


The Reunion

by WolfAndHound_Archivist



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Post-Sirius in Azkaban, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-07
Updated: 2004-11-30
Packaged: 2018-05-18 21:08:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 30,781
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5943133
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WolfAndHound_Archivist/pseuds/WolfAndHound_Archivist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A Reunion</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Night Before

**Author's Note:**

> Note from Lassenia, the archivist: this story was originally archived at [Wolf and Hound](http://fanlore.org/wiki/Wolf_and_Hound), which was created to make stories posted to the Sirius_Black_and_Remus_Lupin Yahoo! mailing list easier to find. However, even though I still love the fandom, I am no longer active in it and do not have the time to maintain it. To preserve the archive, I began manually importing its works to the AO3 as an Open Doors-approved project in December 2015. I posted an announcement with Open Doors, but we may not have reached everyone. If you are (or know) this creator, please contact me using the e-mail address on the [Wolf and Hound collection profile](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/wolfandhound/profile).

I'm not as stubborn as Remus Lupin. I never have been. Despite my twelve years in Azkaban, which taught me that I'm far more resolute and resourceful than I'd imagined, I doubt that I ever will be. I suspect that, when everything's said and done, Remus was born with unimaginable determination-and I know that his thirty-seven years as a werewolf have honed it into the most incredible tool for survival and thriving in the face of adversity that I've ever encountered. When I was first cast into prison, one of the things that kept me going was reminding myself over and over, as if I were reciting a mantra, "Other people have survived terrible injustices. Think of Remy. Be strong like Remy."

Little did I imagine that, when I escaped from Azkaban, I would have to pit my will against Remus's to win him back. Don't get me wrong. He was pleased-from the beginning-to know that I had gotten free of that terrible place. I don't think that Moony would wish imprisonment there on Voldemort himself. He's utterly lacking in that sort of casual malice. And once he learned that I was innocent, that Peter Pettigrew was responsible for James and Lily Potter's deaths as well as the deaths of all those Muggles when I had cornered him, I'm sure that my former lover wished me nothing but the best in life. But, as I soon learned, he did not want ~me~ back in his life.

I can't begin to tell you how that hurt! Of all the wrongs that have been done to me, Remy's rejection is far and away the worst. And yet he's not a bad man, or an unfair one, or even an unduly harsh one. I know that, in his heart of hearts, he honestly believes that I hurt him and that somehow I could have kept from doing so. But I haven't, in all the many months since I left Azkaban, been able to persuade him to discuss the matter with me. To do so would be a confrontation, and Remus Lupin hates confrontations. Since he was a very small boy- burdened with the incredible weight of his lycanthropy-he's been taught to slip away rather than stand and fight and risk the wrath of "normal" wizards and witches, who might-in their fear of what he is-kill him for daring to express the human anger that they take for granted in themselves. Unfortunately, Moony has thrown the full weight of his stubbornness into avoiding any discussion of the issues that separate us, creating a stalemate where I desire reconciliation. Things went from bad to worse when he fell in love with Severus Snape this past summer. At first, I couldn't believe that it was happening. Snape, of all people! When we were boys, Severus was the bane of our existence-or so I had thought. I've recently learned that he and Remus had their first crushes on one another, much as Lupin is my first and deepest love.

(Damn it, Sirius! Be fair. It's not right to say that they had crushes and that what you experienced was so much more. If you hadn't driven Snape away from Remy with that sixth-year prank of yours, who's to say what might have come of their timid, tenuous feelings for one another? Your own love for Remus Lupin wasn't much more than boyish possessiveness in the beginning, or you would never have driven his other suitor away under the pretext that you knew what was best for him. You may have been sixteen and stupid at the time, but you're not now.)

It was a shock, at first, to acknowledge that Moony was indeed in love with my old enemy. After all, the Slimy Git (as I've described Severus Snape for all these years) had threatened Moony with a dementor's kiss, too, and had outed him as a werewolf to Slytherin House and, thus, to Hogwart's entire student body only a few years earlier. I'll be honest. I couldn't, and still can't, imagine why Lupin readily forgave him so much deliberate cruelty but continues to blame me for whatever it is that he thinks that I've done. I've been told, seemingly by everyone under the sun, that one big difference is that Snape apologized and made amends to Remus; but, damn it, I don't feel like I have anything to apologize to Lupin for-and Moony won't give me the opportunity to make amends anyhow. Nor would it be easy to do so, while I'm on the run and without access to my assets.

It didn't help that, in the beginning, Snape was as antagonistic as ever towards me. But what did I expect? I was in no hurry to mend my fences with him, either. In the end, we've become unlikely friends and allies, mostly because of our mutual love for Remus Lupin; but it hasn't been easy. And sometimes I wonder if our amity would withstand Remus's absence, were he suddenly to be out of the picture. I like to think that it ~would~ because, frankly, I need all the friends that I can get these days; but I'm not certain that that would be the case.

As I said before, I'm not as stubborn as Moony. In the face of his love for Severus and his seeming indifference towards me, I almost gave up on ever being his lover again-or even his friend. The more I pushed to get back into Lupin's life, the more he pulled away from me. And day after day I could see how happy he is with Snape. Remy isn't feigning love for the man. He... What can I say? He genuinely adores him, as much as he ever loved and adored me. Perhaps more. Then a cold voice began whispering to me, "What if Lupin never loved you at all? What if he only gave himself to you because you deprived him of the lover he actually wanted?" What a horrible thought! It was almost more than I could bear. I busied myself with loving Elaine MacGregor and struggled, not altogether successfully, to avoid thinking about Remus. Sometimes I wonder how fair that is to either of them. Yet, truly, I love them both to the best of my ability.

And since I do love Remus Lupin, I can't give up on our relationship without a fight. Perhaps I ~should~, but I can't. So last Sunday I began writing him letters every day, telling him how much I want to sit down and talk with him about us. He ignored the first two. His response to third may be summed up, "I'm not ready, Siri." When I asked him in the fourth, "How soon might you be ready?" he ignored that letter, too. His answer to my fifth letter was, in essence, "You're not going to drop this, are you?" When I told him in my sixth that trying to preserve even the rudiments of our friendship meant more to me than I could ever tell him, he agreed to meet with me. He reminded me that Snape had long since offered to be present when we tried work our problems out, and he told me that he ~wants~ him to be there. In my seventh and most recent letter, I agreed to his terms and said that I want to meet with him tomorrow. Severus came a short while ago to tell me that Remus is willing to see me then to discuss our future.

And Snape told me, and showed me, so much more! I've always thought that getting Remus's love back would be a simple matter of persuading him of the rightness of my point of view. Now I understand that, whether my perspective is "correct" or not, regaining his heart is not going to be comparable to winning an acquittal in a court of law. I will have to control my temper-never an easy task-and help him heal his wounds, whether I inflicted them on him or not. Otherwise he will not risk loving me again. Fairness has nothing to do with it. For all his formidable strength, he simply won't be able to be my lover unless some of what he's suffered these past fifteen years is redressed.

When I first understood that, I almost gave up. Isn't love supposed effortlessly to conquer all? The voice hissed, "See! He doesn't love you. He never loved you. Give up, you damned fool!" I pounded my fist on the desk at which I sat and mentally roared, "Shut up!" to that treacherous whisper.

After a moment I heard Severus ask me, for the second time, "What shall I tell Remus, Sirius?"

"That I'll see him after lunch tomorrow, as he's asked me to."

"Black?"

"Yes?"

"Don't hurt him."

"Goddamn it, Severus! I'm not going to hurt Moony. That's the ~last~ thing in the world that I want."

He sighed and gave me a rueful smile. "I know it's the last thing that you ~want~; but have a care, Sirius. If you aren't careful, you won't be the first man to do the last thing in the world that he wanted to!"

There was compassion-ever so odd to see in Snape-glowing in his dark, deep, troubled eyes. I took his warning very seriously. Nodding, I told him, "I'll be careful." I rose and gave him a warm embrace. "Thank you for what you shared with me, Sev. It can't have been easy! Tomorrow I'll remember it and put it to good use."

When he let go of me, he replied, "Yes. Well, I need to be going, Black. Lupin's been alone for quite awhile now and he's very nervous about your upcoming meeting. Good night to you-and a very good morrow to us all."

And I've been alone with my thoughts ever since, with three horrific photographs seared deep into my mind.


	2. The Day Of Reckoning

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The same warnings, disclaimers, pairings, thank-yous, dedications, and so forth cited in the first part still apply. Re: why Severus is helping Sirius try to make up with Remus. It's in his enlightened self-interest, which will become clearer in a bit. Re: calling a lover by his last name. A number of my gay male friends do so under certain circumstances-especially the Brit/Euro ones. However, in THIS segment when Sev refers to Remy as "Professor Lupin" he's just, um, being Snape. Just because he's been in love for several months doesn't mean he's done a PERFECT 180. Have fun, folks! Enjoy... (I hope!) - S.]

Lunch was a fiasco. I picked at my food as though it was infested with maggots, like some of the worst fare in Azkaban. Severus chose to stare at his plate dyspeptically, without eating so much as a forkful of its contents. Remus boycotted the meal altogether. Grace and Elaine ate heartily enough but were atypically subdued in their lack of conversation-and they looked as nervous as squirrels darting across a country road ahead of a lorry. As soon as decently possible, Snape and I excused ourselves from table and headed towards Grace's guest room so that I could have my conference with Lupin. No one, upstairs or down, was comfortable. In fact, we felt as oppressed by the psychic atmosphere as we might have from the stifling heat, heavy humidity, and pent-up electricity of an approaching thunderstorm on a summer night. Not good!

Moony had done his best to get the room ready for our chat. The guest- room bed was spread up with the exacting neatness that he displays when under great emotional stress. The tops of the desk and the dresser were cleared of all clutter. Two wing chairs from our hostess's upstairs parlour had been shoehorned into a space between window and bed somewhat too small to accommodate them-with the result that their occupants could only sit facing straight ahead, unable to turn comfortably to look at one another. As we entered the room, Remus greeted me from one of the chairs.

"Hello, Sirius," he began in a tense voice, pointing to the empty chair beside him. "I'd meant for you to sit here, but I wasn't able to position the bloody thing properly. The one at the writing desk is out of the question, too. It's halfway across the room." He looked at Snape and added, "Sev, as our ombudsman, would you be comfortable taking it? I don't reckon you'll have to physically subdue any quarrels between us."

"Likely not, Remy," Snape agreed dryly, not attempting to hide a wry smile as he folded his tall frame into the sturdy Windsor chair.

"Thank you," Remus replied. Looking at me, he asked, "May I impose upon you to sit on the bed, Sirius? It's not uncomfortable. I perch there myself sometimes-but I'm hardly in the mood at the moment, if it's all the same to you."

I deliberately ignored the criticism inherent in his remark. I nodded and made myself as relaxed as possible on the edge of the bed, facing him.

"So. What do you want to say to me?" he continued-giving me a forced smile that would have made me angry had his eyes not been so obviously edgy above it.

I cleared my throat, hoping to dispel my own anxiety. "I know that I asked to talk to you, Remy," I began, "but at the moment I'd rather listen to you. I know that you're unhappy about how we parted, when James and Lily were killed. Will you tell me what life was like for you after I left?"

Moony frowned. "I hadn't expected you to ask me about that! I'd assumed that you just wanted to tell me that I was wrong to be unhappy and have done with it. I'm not sure that I want to tell you how things were. I certainly hadn't planned to-and you've never seemed all that interested in my experiences before. Why the sudden change of heart?"

I winced. It hurt to acknowledge, even to myself, that I've been so anxious to elicit Remus's compassion by sharing my own tale of woe with him that I haven't been particularly interested in hearing what happened to him. Also my 'change of heart' was the fruit of guilty knowledge. Thanks to Snape's visit last night, I know a great deal more about what happened to Remus after the Law Enforcement wizards turned me over to the dementors of Azkaban.

"A picture is worth a thousand words," the Muggles say. Some are worth even more, of course! And that's even truer of wizards' photographs. Severus showed me three powerful ones last night-one taken at the time of each of Moony's admissions to the emergency receiving-ward at St. Mungo's during my absence. Those dreadful images made me want to understand what had befallen him and how it impacted upon his life. They pricked my conscience and opened my heart to his pain. I have no choice now but to hear his story, will he but share it with me. Yet how can I answer his question? Snape stole the photos from Dumbledore; and Moony, as like as not, won't be pleased that he's shared them with me. What to say?

Severus moved from his chair to slouch against the wardrobe, putting himself into the corner of my visual field. I turned to stare at him for a long moment, mentally begging him to consent to my explaining last night's events to Remus. I do not want to lie to Lupin! Not if, in good conscience, I can refrain. After what seemed like an eternity, Snape walked over to Remus and placed a parchment packet in his hand. "I showed these to Sirius when I arranged this meeting, love," he explained quietly, "because he needed to understand the enormity of your situation."

When Lupin opened the package and saw what was inside, he went as white as chalk. He gasped before asking, "Oh, God! Where did you get these? And why-how-could you have let him see them?"

"I got them from the Headmaster, Moony-" Severus replied, " without telling him that I was borrowing them, I might add. So I'd be grateful if you didn't enlighten Dumbledore about my having appropriated them. I plan to return them to him, equally surreptitiously, at the earliest opportunity. As your guardian and friend, Albus obtained them from St. Mungo's in order to document the abuse that you've been subjected to over the years. He believes that some day our thick-witted fellow wizards will regret what they've done to you-and to the rest of your kind. He says that when they do, they'll need pictures like these to remind them not to go down that path again. As for why I let Black see them...Remy, he couldn't imagine all that was done to you after he was sent to Azkaban. He didn't want to! What happened to you is insufferable, despite the fact that you somehow lived through it-just as what happened to him in Azkaban is insufferable. It hurt him to give it much thought. So he had to see the pictures in order to understand that what happened to you truly was as awful as what had happened to him. I hope you'll forgive me, but I did what I believed...what I still believe...needed to be done."

For a moment, Remus hesitated. In that moment, all three of us knew that he might decide that Snape's behavior was unforgivable. That would leave Moony all alone, with more pain than ever before; because he'd never let either of us get close to him again. I found myself praying more fervently than I knew that I was able to for him to accept Severus's behavior for what it was-genuine concern for his well-being and an heroic willingness to risk their relationship (which means so much to Snape!) in order to help the two of us be reconciled. Finally Lupin's face softened and he reached out shyly to take Severus's hands in his own. "I do forgive you, Sev," he answered gently. "I can't say that I'm happy with what you did. But I accept that you did it with the best of intentions-and I don't reckon that Sirius will use having seen those pictures to hurt me in any way." He looked at me, with an odd mixture of fear and defiance in his eyes. "You found it easy enough to abandon me for the sake of your own ego, of course; but I can't imagine your deliberately holding me up to ridicule or contempt."

I wanted to scream at the top of my lungs, "Damn it, Remy! I didn't abandon you. Stop saying that I did," but I resisted the impulse. Remus Lupin is fair, kind, and gentle, except when the moon changes him-and at one time he was my lover, my spouse, and my best friend. I know him well enough to know that he'd never speak ill of me unless he thought that his accusations were truthful and just. They aren't, but he believes that they are. In some way that I don't clearly understand, it would overload his ability to cope with what happened to him were he to think otherwise. Nor can he pick his fear and pain apart as easily as he undoes his anger. Whether it's fair or not, I'll have to help him if I want him to take me back into his heart. What I heard myself say, almost in a whisper, is "No, darling. I would never deliberately harm you, in any way."

He nodded and tried so hard to give me a smile touched with his customary warmth that I nearly wept. "I know that, Siri," he replied. "I know that you bear no ill-will towards me. But what you did caused me so much pain! I could never endure that happening again. That's why I can't bear to get close to you. What if you went away again, forever?"

In the sunny brightness of Grace Wedmore's guest room, what he said sounded almost craven to me; and Gryffindor that I am I despise all cowardice and longed to tell him to stop being so weak. But Remus isn't a coward, any more than I am when I wake up with my heart racing because I've dreamed of Azkaban. I've learned the hard way that there are things in this world that fill even the bravest and noblest among us with fear and shame. The well-fed and neatly dressed middle-aged Remus Lupin sitting before me didn't decide to keep a safe distance from me. The badly hurt young man in the first of Dumbledore's photographs did. Being close to me had brought a terrible "retribution" down upon him.

The image rises in my mind unbidden, unwilled. Snape's right. I'd never in a million years choose to see Remy looking like that! At twenty-three years old, he's wasted, gaunt, and almost skeletally thin. His eyes are sunken and dull, empty of everything except pain, shame, and terror. Not even the rage that I saw in my own eyes in the cracked mirror of the wardrobe in the Shrieking Shack the night that I finally caught up with Peter Pettigrew smoulders in my lover's eyes. It's obvious that his body is badly bruised, abraded, and lacerated, because the Healer documenting the violence done to him and charged with treating him callously ripped away the sheet that Moony had wrapped himself in. Remus is shivering violently in the photo. I don't know whether that's because he was cold, going into shock, ashamed, or afraid of what was going to be done to him next. Probably he experienced all of those things in the fragment of his life that the snapshot captured.

From what Severus told me, I know that submitting to that bastard of a resident's "care" was, in its way, worse than enduring the beating that had landed him in St. Mungo's emergency receiving-ward. The scum who had slapped, punched, and kicked Remus repeatedly-and who would have killed him had a passing wizard not drawn his wand and ordered them to stop-were from the dregs of our community. They were unemployed Squibs, lacking in intelligence, ambition, and self- esteem. On the other hand, the angry Healer in the photograph was a highly respected professional. Yet he was the first person to openly speak of my lover as "that thing" and "it" in Remy's hearing. Lupin's doctor hated him-for being a werewolf, for having been my lover, for God alone knows what other reasons-but he was all that stood between Moony and death. According to Severus, his informant told him that the doctor's words to Remus as he tore the sheet away were, "Damn you, Lupin, let me do my work and get you out of here! You disgust me." I reckon that hearing that and being treated utterly without compassion must have been as terrible as being fed and cared for (however perfunctorily) by dementors in Azkaban. There was a time when, given a choice, I would have killed myself to escape such care. Poor Moony didn't have that option. Werewolves are unable to commit suicide. All that he could do was endure that angry son of a bitch's treatment as a cruel sequel to a vicious beating. I know that...now.

After much thought, Remus finally answered my question. "I don't know what to tell you," he began. "You're asking about things that happened a long time ago." "But by their very nature you must remember them vividly, Remy," I protested. He looked at the first of the three pictures again and went red-faced- I have no idea whether from embarrassment, anger, or both. "Oh, yes," he acknowledged bitterly, "but what's the point of telling you, Sirius? It won't change anything that happened, will it?"

"It can change what will happen now," I insisted.

I wasn't ready for the harsh laugh and twisted smile that my statement elicited. I flinched. For whatever reason, that freed up Lupin's anger long enough for him to blurt out, "Damn it! What do you care? You didn't care what would happen to me when you ran off to play the hero, did you? You never cared about anything except being a 'brave and noble Gryffindor'. I was just there to cheer you on-and to put out when you were feeling horny!"

Before I could object, he stopped and went pale. For a long moment, he sat there looking horrified and confused. I was so shocked and hurt that I didn't dare say anything. Suddenly Remy looked at Severus and asked, "Why did I say such dreadful things to him?" Then he burst into tears.

Snape moved to Remus's side and crouched in front of him, drawing him into a protective embrace. "I'm not exactly sure, love," he told him, "but apparently-to some extent-you're afraid that what you're saying is true, and you need to know whether it is or not."

Moony nodded before looking at me and demanding in a desperate and desolate voice, "Please tell me that it isn't true, Sirius. Please!"

My paralysis broke. "It isn't," I assured him. "Remus, I'm beginning to understand why you think it is, but it's not true!"

"Then why did you leave me that night? I don't understand. I've never understood. I needed you!"

"I know." I drew a ragged breath, to steady my voice and quiet my nerves. "I'd like to touch you while I tell you my side of it, sweetheart. I just want to hold your hands like Severus did. I won't do anything else, I promise. But will you let me do that much? Please?"

"Why?" came his bewildered response.

"Oh God!" I murmured. "Because I do care about you, Remy-and always have. Very much!"

I stepped closer as Snape simultaneously drew away from him. I sat on my heels and held out my hands to Remus but didn't touch him without his permission. Suddenly he seized them in his own crushing grip and asked, "Do you? Is that true, Siri?" He searched my face carefully for a truth that he needed as desperately as a man lost in a desert for many days needs water.

"Yes, love. There's nothing truer in my life," I told him. "I never meant for you to be alone. I never meant for anyone to hurt you because you were my lover. I never imagined what was going to happen to you when I left you that night." Suddenly he released my hands and flung his arms around my neck. I longed to return his embrace but I had promised him that I wouldn't. He whispered, "Hold me. Please hold me!"

I nodded and drew him onto the floor beside me. Then I coaxed him to follow me as I scooted across the carpet till my back was braced against the wardrobe. I pulled him onto my lap and wrapped my arms around him. I held him close for a very long time, without saying anything. Snape brought us a glass of water, and I shared it with Remus whose throat was raw from weeping. Still holding him, I began to explain to Moony why I'd gone haring into the night fifteen years ago-leaving him to fend for himself as best he could.

"I owed it to Peter to try to help him, darling."

"But he was the traitor!" Lupin objected.

"I'd just realized that. But he was also our friend. He had been for over a decade. I wasn't sure that he hadn't done what he did while under an Imperius. Or that he hadn't been tortured until he broke. Anyone can break under torture, Remy. Don't you know that?"

Reluctantly he nodded.

"I didn't know then what I know now," I continued, "so I couldn't leave him to his fate. I already felt like such a failure! I'd gotten James and Lily killed, and Albus wasn't going to let me raise Harry, as I'd promised to. I'd let everyone down." I paused and sighed. "Except you. You're right about one thing: I just had to be the brave and noble Gryffindor in the hope of repairing my tarnished self-image, of doing enough good to make up for the mischief that I'd set into motion by oh so cleverly changing our friends' Secret Keeper. So I went Apparating off to play the hero, Pettigrew framed me, and you were left by yourself to deal with a sorry pack of idiots who wanted to think the worst of you. But, Remus, please listen to me. I never abandoned you. Abandonment is the conscious choice to forsake someone. I never did that! I will never abandon you. I let that dirty little rat lure me into his trap and I lost my freedom. My mistake sullied your name and left you unprovided for, unprotected, and terribly alone-much to my endless consternation. But I would never deliberately have done any of that to you. If I'd truly known what Peter had become and that he'd done it of his own free will, I'd have left him to his fate in a heartbeat. I look at those pictures of you, darling, and I'm sick with grief and guilt."

Moony ran a trembling hand along my jaw and throat. "For a long time I thought that I wanted you to feel guilty, Siri," he admitted, "but I don't now. It's so confusing! Everyone told me that you were guilty, so I believed them-even though they told me that I was guilty, too, and I knew that I wasn't. I should have known that you were innocent. But I couldn't bear the thought of it. It was bad enough to think that you were guilty and that I was alone with everyone hating me because of you. I'm so sorry!"

"There's nothing to be sorry about," I reminded him. "We forgave one another for the doubts that we had about each other almost three years ago now. Part of what was so bad about that time was that Voldemort had all of us doubting one another. I thought the worst of you, too. But done is done, darling! We've already forgiven each other and you needn't reproach yourself anymore for having misjudged me."

His hand caressed my face and came to rest over my heart centre. "Even when I thought that you were guilty, I wanted you, Sirius. God help me, I wanted you so much! Until our house was firebombed, I dreamed that..."

"Firebombed?" I interrupted him. "Someone burned down our house?"

"Yes."

My heart pounded in my chest. "Were you there when it happened, Remus?"

"Yes, but it wasn't hard to get out. Whoever did it pitched the bomb through the parlour window, and I was out in the kitchen making my supper. I ran out the back door in time to see him run away."

"Who was it?"

"I'm not sure. It was at dusk and he was bundled up in black. My eyes were watering from the smoke. It could have been any of several blokes in the Hollow, actually."

"Didn't you recognize his scent?"

Remus laughed. "Not with any certainty, Siri. I'd gotten a nose full of smoke and petrol fumes, as well."

"But our house was destroyed?"

"Oh, yes!"

"Where did you go?"

"Different places," he answered evasively. "I tried to stay with my folks at first, but I...There were threats and I wasn't willing to put them at risk. So I just moved on. A few times. Several times. No one would rent to me, so I stayed in caves and such for a while. Rather like you in your cave outside Hogsmeade. Actually, it was of no great import that they weren't renting to me after the first few months, because no one would give me work and I soon ran out of money."

"What happened then?"

He frowned. "The Headmaster sent me to stay with a friend in the States-but I made a mistake and had to come home."

It was my turn to frown. "Remus, did Professor Davies have any idea what she was sending you back to the UK to face?"

"No, of course not!" he answered indignantly. "I didn't want her to know, because...because she might have let me stay out of pity; and I didn't want to go from being loved to being pitied. Besides, I honestly thought that with my having been gone for a month things might have calmed down."

"But they hadn't?"

He shook his head and a look of heartbreaking sadness clouded his beautiful face. "No."

"So you were back here among us with no home and no job."

"That's right."

I pointed to the picture, where it lay on the floor beside Remy's wing chair. "And you damned near let yourself starve to death! Why, Remus? Albus would have found you a safe place to stay and seen that you at least had food, if you'd let him."

He shrugged. "It wasn't safe-and I wasn't that bad off, Sirius."

"The hell you weren't!" I exploded. I jabbed my finger towards the photo taken at St. Mungo's. "Remy, you're not just beaten up in that picture. You're half dead from hunger, too. You weren't any thinner when you...when Severus saved your life this summer. Why did you do that to yourself? Why wouldn't you let the Headmaster help you?"

"I'm a werewolf, Sirius," he replied in a hurt voice. "I couldn't stay at the castle-and Dumbledore didn't have anywhere else to send me at the time."

"Why the hell couldn't you have stayed at Hogwarts?" I demanded. "No one could bloody well have fire-bombed the school!"

"I couldn't have done that," he protested. "The children..."

"Goddamn it, Remus! The other students were safe for seven years while you attended Hogwarts. Seven years. Close to a hundred lunations. All you had to do was let Madame Pomfrey lock you up at the full moon."

He turned in my arms to face me. "It wasn't the same as when we were boys," he told me gravely. "The situation was much the same as it was three years ago. The public was aware of what I am. You're right that they couldn't have burned down the castle; but they could, and would, have taken their children out of school. I couldn't be the cause of that. So I found a safe place to winter over and got by as best I could. I didn't do too badly."

I groaned.

He gave me a quick hug and the warmth and weight of his body pressed against mine filled me with longing-not lust. I remained unaroused sexually. But I was consumed with the desire to make peace with this remarkable man and spend the rest of my days in his company.

"I was still alive and able to take reasonably good care of myself after being homeless and jobless for over a year," he continued. "Not bad that! I think that you ought to be proud of me."

"I'm very proud of you! But that doesn't mean that I can't be amazed and appalled at just how little help that you received in 'getting by'. That was criminal of our wizardly peers, Remy-truly criminal. And I would especially like to see some Ministry officials and Law Enforcement Wizards held accountable for the abuse and neglect that you endured."

Moony nodded. "I'd like to see that, too, if the truth be told. But you mustn't tilt any windmills to see that justice is belatedly done, my dear. And especially not until your name is cleared. I absolutely do not want you back in Azkaban, or dead! Whatever begrudged assistance I might receive would never be worth that."

"I suppose not," I agreed despondently, "but you can't begin to imagine how awful it feels not to have protected you and not to be able to obtain justice for you now. What kind of man does that make me, not to take care of my own mate?"

Remus sighed, "One with major problems of his own to deal with. And I haven't exactly done an exemplary job of taking care of you these past fifteen years either, have I? I think it's best that we forgive each other, and ourselves, for not having been paragons of male virtue and get on with our lives, Sirius. Don't you?"

I nodded. "It won't be easy, but I suppose you're right. Remy, I...I wanted to take good care of you, from the day that I met you."

He blushed and favoured me with one of his mysterious but beatific smiles. "I know that. And you've done very well, all in all. And one of the things that I learned while you were in Azkaban is that I don't have to be taken care of as much as I'd thought. It wasn't a pleasant lesson, but it's something that I'm glad to know. It makes me feel better about myself-and less afraid." He gave a mischievous little snort, a sound that I remembered very well from our days at Hogwarts. "So thanks for letting me down a bit. It served a good purpose!"

I laughed despite myself. It was-and sounded like-a sob as much as laughter, but my acceptance of Lupin's skewed humour was genuine. I've always loved his ability to de-fuse his suffering through irony and gentle mockery. "Would you like to get up and sit somewhere more comfortable?" I asked.

"Oh, is my stout little Welsh body getting too heavy for your lap?"

"Not at all, but this rock-solid oak wardrobe is getting far to too hard for my decrepit back."

He stood up and gave me his hand. Once I was on my feet, he headed back to the wing chair.

"Wait!" I protested. "Is there any reason why you shouldn't sit beside me on the bed, Remus?"

"I suppose not," he admitted.

"Then grab the other two pictures and come join me-all right?"

He froze. "Surely there's no need..."

I wasn't certain what to say. On the one hand, I didn't want to put Moony through any unnecessary mental anguish; on the other, I genuinely wanted to understand all that had happened to him while I was gone. I felt somewhat afraid that, given the chance to avoid talking it out with me now, Remus would never discuss it with me at all. Furthermore, I knew that, if he didn't discuss it with me, all our good intentions notwithstanding his resentment (and mine!) might easily return.

Apparently my silence was eloquent. He murmured, "I guess there is," and stooped to gather up the wizards' photos.

Snape interrupted before I could speak. "Remus, there are advantages to your talking about those snapshots, but neither of us can insist that you do so." "He's right," I added. "In fact, I was going to tell you that myself."

Moony laughed and shook his head. "Sometimes you two amaze me! Gentlemen, if I didn't want to discuss these lovely little slices of my life with you, I promise you that you couldn't force me to with a bloody Imperius. A Cruciatus perhaps, but definitely not an Imperius!" He plopped onto the edge of the bed beside me and handed me the photographs.

I studied the second one for a long time. As had been the case the previous night, it confused me. In some ways it resembled the first photo, but there were differences. For one thing, Remus was decently covered. He'd wrapped an examining-table sheet around his waist and was clutching it tightly in place, but the resident-who was being courteous and reasonably gentle-appeared to be listening to his heart and lung sounds, which meant there was good reason for Lupin's chest and upper back to be uncovered. Although my lover was somewhat underweight, he was not horribly emaciated. He was a few years older than in the first picture but definitely still in his twenties. He appeared to be ill as well as injured. He was red-faced, glassy-eyed, and blank looking, as though from a fever. After a moment, a series of wracking coughs that left him gasping for breath confirmed my impression that he was sick. Although he was badly bruised and abraded, his most pronounced injuries were a series of jagged lacerations scattered about his trunk and arms-and, judging from one running along his right ankle, possibly his legs as well. What makes wounds like that? I asked myself. They're familiar. I should know... Nor was Moony displaying "brave and noble Gryffindor" stoicism in this photograph. He was crying disconsolately. What in the name of heaven had happened to him this time?

I cleared my throat self-consciously before observing, "Sweetheart, you're obviously both sick and hurt in this picture. Did some one assault you while you were too ill to defend yourself, or were you assaulted and left to fend for yourself so that you sickened afterwards from exposure?"

"Neither exactly. I still didn't have a job or money for lodging, so I'd been staying in the Cotswold, living off fish and small animals and nuts and berries and such. Off whatever I could scavenge actually, plus what I could earn from a bit of day labour now and then. Winter was coming in a few more weeks, and I was worried about where to stay. Anyhow several days before the full moon, I came down with a chest cold that turned into pneumonia. I should have gone to St. Mungo's right away, but I really hate dealing with doctors and hospitals. You know that."

I nodded. Poppy Pomfrey used to claim that she had never seen two children as averse to medical care as Remus Lupin and Severus Snape. I don't know what Severus hates about putting himself at the mercy of Healers, but it doesn't take any N.E.W.T.s to comprehend Remus's distaste for the experience. Every full moon since he was three he's had the opportunity to re-experience how painful, humiliating, and useless all their poking, prodding, examinations, and treatments can be. When we were living together in Godric's Hollow all those long years ago, Moony lay abed while his appendix ruptured rather than go to St. Mungo's werewolf ward for diagnosis and medical care. When I asked him about it afterwards, he told me, "My gut hurt, dear. I figured sooner or later it would stop hurting. I thought that I'd just wait it out and not have to deal with the system."

I tapped the photograph. "What happened when you didn't go to St. Mungo's as soon as you realized how sick you were?"

He sighed. "When the full moon arrived, I was too weak to Apparate there; so I had two choices."

"To hide in the forest and resist the impulse to hunt human prey once you changed," I acknowledged, "or to turn yourself in to the local authorities."

"That's right. So I opted for surrendering myself to the local authorities. There was a little village-mostly of wizarding folk-not far from where I'd been staying in the woods. The sheriff and all his deputies were wizards. I went to him and claimed my right to be locked up for 'the common good'. What I didn't know was that the village had a very small holding pen-and another werewolf. A female werewolf."

I gasped and shuddered despite myself, uncomfortably sure of where his story was headed. "Then what happened, darling?" I inquired nervously-with a weak smile that likely looked as forced to him as it felt to me.

He studied me carefully before answering. "Ingrid-that was their werewolf's name-was menstruating. What do you suppose happened, Sirius?"

I knew, of course, but I couldn't force myself to answer him-damn me!

He nodded. "I see that you get the general picture, so I won't elaborate on it overly much. The moon rose, we changed, and I raped her-repeatedly."

"No," I protested. "No, no, no! You weren't responsible... You couldn't help yourself."

"No, I couldn't," he answered grimly, "which didn't help poor Ingrid, did it?" Again I couldn't think of what to say. When Remus stood and I knew that he was about to leave the room, I grabbed his wrists hoping desperately to detain him until I could find words to express my feelings. I knew that he thought that I despised him, which I did not.

Lupin struggled to escape until I lost hold of one of his wrists, and then he ordered me to let go of him. When I ignored his demand, he began flailing at me with his free arm. The edge of his large, strong hand caught me across the bridge of the nose and started it bleeding. My blood gushed onto Remus and he stared at it in horror. When I released my grip on his other wrist in order to express assurance of my love and trust, he darted for the door.

Snape intercepted him. He didn't try to lay hold of Lupin, but he used his lanky, broad-shouldered body to block his egress.

"There's nothing else that I have to say to Sirius," Remus told Severus with as defiant a voice as he could muster.

"Don't be so sure, my sweet man," Snape replied. "Perhaps Azkaban has worn the rough edges off your paramour's air of moral superiority."

I bristled but did not speak.

Remy shook his head. "I raped that girl," he insisted.

"No. At the time that you had sex with her, you were incompetent by virtue of temporary lunacy. So was she, for that matter," Severus added morosely.

"That doesn't change the fact that she got sexually assaulted, does it?"

"No, love," Snape replied gently, resting a hand on Lupin's shoulder.

I was furious! How could he say that to Remus? How dared he! I was well on my way to literally seeing red when Moony let Severus draw him into a comforting embrace.

"Nothing can change that," Snape added, stroking Remy's hair. "I won't deny that."

"And that was the worst thing that I could ever do, except kill and feed."

"Yes," Severus agreed, in a soothing voice. "It was. But you never did anything like that before that particular full moon and you've never done anything like it since. Nor would you have done it then, had you been given any choice. That cretinous sheriff and his moronic deputies, on the other hand, had every opportunity not to sexually assault either Ingrid or you. And they did assault both of you. I looked the laws up after you first told me what had happened. Under our law and the Muggles', those men were guilty of sexual assault by virtue of forcing both of you to commit non-consensual sex acts, as well as of raping Ingrid and of battering you. They should be in Azkaban-or a Muggle maximum-security prison, darling; and, if you're ever willing, the Headmaster and I will see to it that they are locked up for the rest of their disgusting lives."

Remus shook his head vehemently. "I'm neither brave enough nor foolish enough to bring charges against 'respectable wizards', Sev. I'm just grateful that you don't hate me for what I did."

Severus gave him an uneasy smile. "I could never do that, my darling man. I understand the difference between a victim and a rapist perfectly well."

"As do I, Remus," I said quietly. "What happened was dreadful, and I want to kill that swine of a sheriff and all his friends for having put you, and the young lady, through it. But you aren't responsible. I know you well enough to know that you must consider that cold comfort, but you did what you did in all innocence, as did Ingrid. And what happened doesn't change my love for you in the least."

"But when I was telling you, you wouldn't say anything!"

"I didn't know what to say! It wasn't anything that I could gloss over and it wasn't anything for which I can blame you, and I simply didn't know what to say." I shook my head, "Why is it always so hard for me to find the right words to comfort you, Remy? I love you. I swear I do. And I don't judge you. I swear I don't. But I can't seem to get the right words out to help you feel better. Bloody Snape can, but I can't! What the hell's the matter with me?"

"Not a damned thing is wrong with you, Black," Severus muttered. "You just worry yourself into silence from time to time-and our friend here doesn't deal all that well with pregnant silences, do you, Remy?"

Remus half turned in his arms to face me. "No, I don't," he acknowledged. "I don't deal well with them at all."

"Which is why you need to let Sirius hold you when the cat's got his tongue," Snape continued.

"No! I can't," Moony argued.

"And why is that, Professor Lupin?" Severus asked almost banteringly. "You let me hold you when the kitty has abducted my tongue, and you invited Mr. Black to hold you a very short time ago. What, pray tell, is the difference?"

"You don't think I'm awful anymore, and..."

"Goddamn it, Remus!" I roared. "I don't think you're awful. Will you please get that through that thick skull of yours? I...do...not...think...you're...awful! I didn't think so when we were eleven and I'd just found out that you're a werewolf. I didn't think it when I became your lover or when I married you. And I certainly don't think it now. If I've ever actually met a saint, you're it."

"Saints don't enjoy buggering or have an inordinate fondness for chocolate, Sirius."

"Oh, stop that! You know what I'm saying, Remy."

He nodded. "But the last year that we were married you did think that I was awful. You thought that I'd gone over to the Enemy. What's to stop you from thinking something like that again?"

"Having learned from my own stupidity! Doubting you was the worst mistake of my life. If I'd bothered to listen to my heart at the time, James and Lily would still be alive, I wouldn't have gone to Azkaban, and you wouldn't have spent fifteen years of your life at the mercy of a pack of dirty-minded, mean-spirited, self-righteous idiots, who don't know the meaning of the word 'mercy'. Oh, yes, and we might well have rid ourselves of Tom Effing Marvolo Riddle the first time around!"

"You...you blame yourself for all that?"

"Yes!"

Remus frowned. "You shouldn't, you know. I was innocent, but..."

"Remy, I'd known you long enough not to believe all our prejudices about werewolves. Don't you know that?"

He nodded. "Yes. I do know that, but there was circumstantial evidence that I might have gone over-or even been put under a curse. You're not God omniscient to have known for sure, Siri. It hurt like hell that you doubted me, but I really did understand. It's just...I wish you'd accused me of something, so that I could have defended myself!"

"I know. But I couldn't. If you had been the traitor..."

"It wouldn't have done for me to know that you'd seen through my feigned innocence."

We both sighed heavily. I held my arms out to Lupin and he moved into them hesitantly. Snape went back to his chair at the desk. When Remus and I let go of each other, I quietly led him back to the bed; but I crouched on the floor in front of him rather than sharing it with him. "Who wounded you like that?" I finally asked.

"Why I did, Sirius-just like I used to before you and James and Peter learned the Animagus Transformation. I was so frustrated the last night of that full moon! I wanted to stop hurting Ingrid, and I wanted to escape, and I wanted to kill myself (even though I knew that I couldn't), and I wanted to tear the sheriff and his cronies to blood-soaked tatters. The night passed more slowly than you can possibly imagine, and I got angrier and angrier and angrier. So finally I started biting and clawing at myself. I wish I'd thought of it sooner. I passed out from blood loss and didn't do anything else to Ingrid. Why didn't I think of it the first night?"

I shook my head and stood to enfold Remy in my arms. "Darling, you shouldn't have to harm yourself to protect someone else! You...No one should have to do what you did. James and Peter and I hoped that you'd never go back to hurting yourself the way that you had as a boy."

"I have a lot more scars now, Sirius. Do you forgive me? When I'm locked up I can't help myself. And I was thirty before it occurred to me that the centaurs might help me."

"What?" Snape and I asked together.

"I finally realized that I didn't have to go to St. Mungo's or to a local lock-up. I asked the centaurs in the Forbidden Forest to keep me from doing harm to anyone. They agreed to constrain me, like you do. That's why I ran into the Forest the night that you drove me away from the children and Snape, Siri. I knew that once I was in, they wouldn't let me back out before moonset. I moved down to Devonshire a few months later, after a new stallion took charge of the herd. He doesn't like humans at all, and-can you believe it? -he swears that I'm just one more human that he has no intention of dealing with ever again."

"Smart centaur," Severus remarked sourly.

"What?" Lupin asked, graceful eyebrows rising quizzically.

"The damned beast is aware that you're a human being, which makes him ever so much brighter than most wizards and witches of my acquaintance," Snape explained. "Myself included for many years. Nevertheless, there was obviously a jackass somewhere in his ancestry for him to have withdrawn his people's aid to you."

Remus gave a shuddering laugh and freed himself from my hold. "Best you not tell him that, Sev," he remarked mildly. "He'd kick you so hard that Poppy would refuse to release you for-oh, three days' minimum, I should think." He turned back to me. "Have I said enough about the bloody photograph, Sirius?" he asked wearily.

I nodded and squeezed his hand. "Yes, darling. You've said quite enough."

"Well, shall we have a look at the last one then?" he inquired. "I'd as soon have it over and done with, at this point."

"Are you sure that you're up for it, Remus?"

"Oh, yes," he answered me, almost cheerfully. "There's not a lot that I can tell you about this one. I was brought into the receiving ward unconscious, and I stayed that way for a full lunation. And although my memory of what led up to my being beaten into a coma has improved, there are still significant gaps in it. Gaps you could drive a Muggle lorry through, in fact. So fire away and I'll answer as best as I can," he concluded-with a smile that wasn't so much insincere as smugly content about his incapacity to enlighten me. I studied the picture carefully, searching out a key that would open its mysteries to me. None presented itself. This photo is so lacking in animation that one might, at first glance, mistake it for a Muggle snapshot. Moony is unconscious on the examining table. Except for the Healer's hand occasionally entering the frame to work magic, the only movement in the image is Lupin's slow, shallow breathing. He's obviously naked beneath the sheet covering his abdomen and legs; and yet he's been carefully draped-whether to preserve his modesty, to keep him warm, or both, I can't tell. He's also been carefully cleaned up. Someone has wiped the blood from his wounds. As for those wounds, they're dreadful-especially the ones to his normally lovely face. Remus was my lover for almost six years before I went to Azkaban, and one of my greatest pleasures has always been looking at his face. I can tell you from memory details of how he looked at sixteen or twenty-one, as surely as if I was consulting a photograph. In the snapshot from St. Mungo's, his face is so badly damaged that I'm only certain that I'm looking at Moony because I recognize his torso and arms and the pattern of scars that cover them. That sounds unbelievable, but it's true! Both of his eyes are swollen shut, with his eyelids and the whole orbital area angry red, well on its way to turning blackish purple. I can tell from an odd dimple below his right eye that the bone beneath it has been pulverized. His left ear is semi-detached, more than half ripped from his head, and is also swollen and bruised. His nose has been broken in two places. His mouth is bloody, turning dark, puffy, and twisted, with bits of white grit embedded in his lower lip that I realize (to my horror) are fragments of his shattered front teeth. His jaw is either dislocated or perhaps fractured-it's difficult to say which. Suddenly I catch myself silently blessing the resident who cared for Remy. Had he fallen back upon the prevalent, "Who cares? It's just a filthy werewolf!" thinking so typical of our medical profession, my lover would have been horribly disfigured for life. Instead the hands moving deftly in and out of the picture painstakingly set healing charms on each of Remus's facial injuries before their owner sent Lupin to the werewolf ward, even though the Healer had no way of knowing at the time whether he would ever wake from the depths of his coma. I looked from the wizards' photo to Moony quietly sitting in front of me, and I damned near wept and I did begin to tremble uncontrollably. I took deep breaths to help me stay calm and reached out and traced the lines of my spouse's face, to remind myself that his attackers had not been allowed to efface his beauty permanently.

"When did this happen, Remus?" I finally asked, once I trusted myself not to lose control. "You obviously weren't in your twenties any more."

"No, my days as a beautiful lad were long over and done with," he answered with a plaintiveness that made me want to wince. "The photo's two or three years old."

I narrowed my eyes suspiciously. "This happened to you the year that I escaped from Azkaban," I stated decisively.

He shook his head and gave me an odd smile. "Actually, it happened to me in January of the following year. Roughly six months after I left Hogwarts."

I looked from Lupin to Snape and back to Lupin. "There's something I've never quite understood that I'd like to, Remus."

"What's that?"

"Harry Potter told me about the circumstances of your departure when we first began exchanging owls, soon after I'd left the UK. He said that Snape told his entire House about your lycanthropy, and they saw to it that everyone else at Hogwarts was aware of your condition before the breakfast dishes had been cleared away."

"That's right."

"But when I told the Headmaster that I wanted to flog Severus for having caused you to lose your job, he told me that Snape hadn't caused you to lose your job."

"That's also right. I resigned my post."

"Because you'd been outed?"

"Because I'd been a bloody fool and put innocent children at risk."

"But Severus wanted you to lose your job," I began.

"Indeed!" Snape interrupted. "I still wanted to believe that you were a murderer, Black. And I was furious that Lupin persisted in believing that you were innocent. And even more furious that he'd been involved in your getting away and, with you, the reward and recognition that I felt I deserved. I didn't precisely wander into the Slytherin Common Room planning to ruin Remus's good name, but I was cheesed off enough not to give a bloody damn about protecting it either. So when Mr. Crabbe announced to one and all that he'd spotted a naked man running towards the castle who 'must' be Sirius Black, I told him, 'No, you unspeakable cretin, that must have been Professor Lupin, freshly back from a night of scouring the Forbidden Forest for the fat haunch of a dunderhead such as yourself!'-or words to that effect. When the moron stammered, "Are you saying th-th-that P-P- Professor Lupin is a w-w-werewolf, sir?' I answered him, 'Of course, he's a werewolf, you incredible nitwit! Why else would he wander out of the Forbidden Forest au naturel just after moonset on the morning following the full moon?' 'Au na...nat... natural?' he continued. 'Naked, you idiot!' I snarled at him. After that little exchange, the in-House grapevine spread word of Remus's misadventure throughout our precincts at just under the speed of light. What with Slytherins being remarkably talented gossips and all, his fate was sealed. So, although Lupin doesn't blame me for his unemployment as DADA instructor, I do hold myself responsible. Does that clear things up for you, Sirius?" he asked almost arrogantly.

I was about to give him a singularly nasty affirmative when I realized that his haughty voice notwithstanding Severus Snape was fighting back tears.

"A moment, love," I told Moony and he nodded his consent.

Then I walked across the room to Severus and crouched before him as I had done with Lupin. "Actually, I need to ask you one more thing, Sev: Why not believe Remus when he tells you that you didn't get him sacked? He's a very honest man, and so's Dumbledore. And you yourself just said that you didn't plan what happened. Why not believe him and stop rubbing salt in your wounds?"

Moony had quietly joined us as I spoke. Snape stared up at him in bewilderment. "I'm sorry, Remus. This is supposed to help you and Sirius...not me. I should have kept my mouth shut!"

Lupin leaned over to kiss him on the mouth and cradle the back of his head in one of his big hands. Suddenly Severus was crying. I could scarcely believe it but tears were running down his face freely and he was sobbing till he shook from it. "Shh, Sev. Not to worry," Moony murmured. "His understanding you helps Siri comprehend how I can love you. It's germane. Besides, I want to know what helps or harms you. I love you, you daft prat. Live with it!"

He held Snape awhile longer, stroking his hair and giving him another kiss or two as he regained his composure. Then Remus clasped Severus's hand in his own and stood once more. "This is how I see it, you two," he explained carefully, as if to a pair of slightly slow children of whom he was nonetheless inordinately fond. "I resigned my post because I wanted to. I was quite put out with myself that morning." He shuddered at the memory. "Quite. Severus may have wanted me to go, and Albus definitely wanted me to stay-as did your godson, Sirius; but I left of my own free will, and I have no regrets or resentments about having done so. So, for my two knuts' worth, the art of gossip as practiced in Slytherin House is utterly irrelevant to what took place. As is Sev's angry dialog with Mr. Crabbe. Shall we three agree that my point of view is the correct one in this instance?"

After a moment's hesitation I nodded. Finally Snape did so as well. Remus smiled at me and gestured towards the bed. "Let's make ourselves comfortable and get to the end of this. As far as I'm concerned, there can't be too much more to say."

He sat back down in the wing chair and I sat on the floor facing him, leaning against the bed that he shares with Severus. "What happened to you, Remy, the night that this picture was taken?"

"The morning," he corrected. "The morning of the January full moon two years ago I crept back into a deserted warehouse-well outside the outskirts of a lovely farming community down in Dyfed -were I'd stashed my robes, to wait out my change back into human form. Fortunately for them, but not so fortunately for me, half a dozen drunken Squibs wandered in before I was, um, quite myself. One of them knew who I was and spouted the most lurid fantasies about how I'm able to use my werewolf appetites to destroy the evidence of my pedophilic lust towards small boys."

"Your what?" I asked in utter disbelief.

"The operative word in the previous sentence was 'fantasies', Sirius. But the bloke persuaded his cronies that his fantasies were indisputable facts. I was too weak from my transformations to fight them off; so, to put it crudely, they beat the shit out of me. I remember parts of what happened, but I wasn't too keen on staying grounded at the time. In fact, I recall fervently praying to die. I became rather more acquainted with the gents' fists, elbows, knees, and boots than I cared to, I promise you. Finally one of them slammed my head against the cement floor once too often and my consciousness went elsewhere for a solid month. I woke up in St. Mungo's just as the following full moon was commencing. Luckily for me, I was considered too frail for the general lock-up because of my brain damage and the weight that I'd lost while in the coma; so I got a private room that wasn't too filthy all to myself and anything that I wanted to eat while in human form. And once the full moon had passed, some chapel-goers donated a new set of robes, a ticket to Hogsmeade, and ten quid to get me away from their fair city."

"Why new robes?" I asked-rather stupidly as it turned out, but it kept the frightening questions about month-long comas and brain damage at bay.

"As I said, Sirius, my assailants were Squibs-just like the first time I got beaten senseless. The idea of a werewolf being a trained wizard doesn't set well with them. They don't think that it's fair that I received the training that they didn't. They burned my robes to make the point. According to the Law Enforcement Wizards, the evidence at the crime scene suggested that they meant to burn me, too."

"What!"

He shrugged. "It seems I'd been liberally doused with petrol, love, as had the area immediately surrounding me. It's all pied up in my mind, but I may have been threatened with getting gang-banged and burned afterwards. I know it's stupid that I'm not sure, but I dreamed-or hallucinated-many grotesque things during my coma; so I'm not entirely sure where reality ends and my nightmares begin."

Remus had tried valiantly to tell me all that without losing his composure; but in the end, he began to shake noticeably and became very withdrawn. I had no more questions to put to him. He can tell me anything else that he pleases in his own good time or I shall inquire of the Headmaster if I need information that Remus is not prepared to share with me. I'd been so sure that my lover's fate had been less cruel than mine! I was wrong. What was done to each of us was unforgivable. I cannot demand of him, "Forgive me because I suffered far more than you did." I can only hope to ease his suffering, as I hope that he that will be willing to help ease mine.

Severus joined us as Remus ended his recital of the events that led to his final journey to St. Mungo's emergency-receiving and werewolf wards. It was to him that Moony stretched out his arms, and it was Snape who held him and comforted him and helped him let go of the horrors that I had insisted that Lupin confide in me. In that moment, more than any other, I accepted the depth of love that exists between the two of them. It is-all my harsh moral judgments of Snape notwithstanding-beautiful and worthy of celebration.

I like to think that Remy and I loved one another as much as they do, when we were young men dreaming of brilliant careers and a long and happy relationship, before my sojourn in Azkaban. Perhaps we were, but perhaps not. I can't say with certainty. I would like to love Moony as much as Snape does now, but I no longer hope that he might let me. So perhaps the time has come to tell Remus Lupin goodbye.

"You love Severus very much," I said to him, after Snape had returned to his chair.

"Yes."

"Despite everything that he did to hurt you from the time that you were sixteen years old."

"Yes."

"You forgive him everything."

"Yes."

"Then why won't you forgive me?"

"I've forgiven you everything that you ever asked me to, Sirius, beginning when I was sixteen."

"Until tonight I never thought that I owed you an apology for leaving you to try and help Peter; but, in a way, I do. Will you forgive me for that, too?"

"Yes, of course."

"And will you let me love you again?"

"I don't know! I'm not sure that I trust you not to hurt me again."

"But you trust Severus not to hurt you again?"

Bewildered pain fills his eyes-and fear, the raw terrible fear that is the sum of the fear that the man in the three wizards' photographs has experienced. "Y-y-yes," he stutters in a strangled whisper. "I trust him, but not you. I love you, but..."

"That's not fair, Remy, and you know it," I answered him sadly, "but if hurting me heals you..."

"No," he said in a forlorn voice. "I've found that hurting you, or anyone else, only adds to my pain."

"Ah, Moony! We never wanted to hurt each other, but we've done a bloody lovely job of mucking things up, haven't we?"

My eyes felt hot and stung with unshed tears that began to spill down my cheeks. Remus caught one on a fingertip and stared at it in wonder. "Siri...I..."

"There's no hope for us, is there, Remy? You know, it's hard to be this close to you and not take you into my arms," I told him. "Mind you, I would never want to 'steal' you from Severus. I just want to love you, too, and not like a brother either, although... Damn it, I love you so much that I'd even settle for that, as painful as it would be!"

Remus looked very troubled and uncertain. "Not all that long ago you said that you didn't even want to be friends..."

"Oh, Moony! I do want to be friends--and more; but if we can't talk things out, what sort of relationship can we have? Severus and I used to be bitter enemies, but over these past few months we've managed to forge and maintain a workable friendship because we communicate with each other."

"I'm not Severus, Siri...and some things are hard for me to say."

"Goddamn it, Remus, I know that! Sometimes it seems that whatever I say to you is the wrong thing."

"I feel the same way."

"I'm sorry."

Remus shook his head. "You never used to apologize."

"I did but you never seemed to hear me, Remy." He looked downcast. "I want to be your friend! Even if we have to take it from Square One and start completely over." I held my hand out to him. "Hullo, Remus Lupin. I'm Sirius Black. How d'you do?"

To my amazement, he pulled me into a hug by my proffered hand. My head rested against his chest, so that I felt the powerful but rapid beating of his heart. He cradled my head in one strong hand and murmured reassurances to me that we were indeed friends and that everything would be all right. I felt so loved! I wrapped my arms around his waist and nestled closer to the warm comfort of his body. His encouragement re-kindled my longing to win Moony back. Suddenly I heard myself desperately asking unthinkably difficult questions: "Remy, what did you mean when you said that you love me? You're so happy to be in love with Snape. Did you ever love me like that, at all?"

My query shocked but didn't anger him. "Yes, of course I loved you, Siri," he answered with a look of chagrin on his face. "What a dreadful thing to ask! If I hadn't loved you, I would never have submitted to your embraces-or offered you mine." He sighed and a small shudder ran through him. "I still love you, sexually and emotionally." He blushed and stared at the floor. "That's why I can't let myself trust you and, most of the time, can't bear for you to touch me. I'm afraid that I'll succumb to my feelings for you and end up getting hurt again!"

I pulled back from him in horror. I wasn't appalled by what he had said. For the first time I was armed with the knowledge of what loving me had, in fact, cost my mate. I wanted to hold him and console him, but I was paralyzed. "I mustn't," I thought. "I mustn't! It will only make him more afraid of me." Despite my intention not to touch Remus uninvited, I reached out to him with one hand. With intense effort, I stopped before it could reach his shoulder. It came to a halt between us, shaking as if it were palsied.

Suddenly I was living the dream that I had early this summer. Remus stared at me in amazement and carefully took my hand in his own. To my astonishment, he kissed the back of it. Then he carefully turned it over and kissed its palm and each of my fingers. Then he reached out and cupped my face in his hand. His eyes were wet with tears, too. I leaned in close. Our lips met.

"Perhaps I'm not too afraid to give us a try, Siri," he stated gravely. "I miss you terribly. As much as I love Severus, it doesn't change what I feel for you. I want you both." He kissed me again, more passionately, and drew me back into his arms. Then his lips brushed against my cheek and neck repeatedly, as softly as snowflakes but warm-so warm-dissolving the cold despair that I've felt for so many months.

I tried to rise and return his kisses, but he was standing too close for me to do so; so I seized his hand and pressed my lips to it over and over, as tenderly and thoroughly as he had mine. As he continued to bend down and kiss me, he began to lean forward, pressing me backwards onto the bed. I gladly cooperated, leaving him space to scramble beside me. It was then that I saw Snape preparing to leave the room. He gave me a reassuring smile before turning the doorknob. Moony froze at the sound of the door opening. Then he gave me a quick kiss on the lips and jumped up to intercept Severus. "Don't leave me!" he begged. "I..." Snape silenced him with a kiss. "I have no intention of leaving you, Remus," he promised him, "if by that you mean giving you up." He traced the line of Lupin's jaw with his thumb and then retraced it with his lips. "But I'm leaving the farm for a while on an errand. It seems a good time to take care of it. Your reunion with Black has reached the point at which a negotiator is worse than useless." He stepped back from Moony to regard us both. "Enjoy yourselves, gentlemen. I'd say you've earned it."

I was completely nonplussed. "Severus, I...For heaven's sake, man! You don't have to leave. Remus and I can go elsewhere to do what we have in mind. I'm sure that you'd rather we didn't celebrate the resumption of our union in your bed!" Snape's laughter was as wild and fey as my sister's. Perhaps over the years her mannerisms have begun to rub off on him. "Don't be a bloody idiot, Black!" he insisted. "First off, this isn't my bed. It's Grace's. She can't wait for you and Lupin to resume making love, so I'm certain that she won't begrudge you the use of it. None of us will." He smiled at Remus. "The long-anticipated decrease in tension between you two will be an enormous relief to the rest of clan Wedmore, you know!" He turned back towards me. "Secondly, Professor Lupin is my lover, not my property-which means that he can share his body with whom he damned well pleases and I won't object. And lastly, as I've already stated, I have an errand elsewhere."

"Your errand seems very sudden, Sev," I remarked suspiciously.

"Well, it isn't! I was charged with it years ago," he observed cryptically, "but, until now, it would have been premature." He tilted Remus's face upward and shared a lingering, sensuous kiss with him. "I'll be back late tonight, darling, but I shan't disturb you before morning."

Moony sighed. "At least come tell me good night, all right?" I nodded my agreement to Remy's request.

Snape shrugged. "Very well, gentlemen. I promise to pop in long enough to tuck my moonchild in." Then he gave Remus a final fond kiss, waved to me, and was gone.

"The Reunion", Part 2 (of 4)

[Author's note: The same warnings, disclaimers, pairings, thank-yous, dedications, and so forth cited in the first part still apply. Re: why Severus is helping Sirius try to make up with Remus. It's in his enlightened self-interest, which will become clearer in a bit. Re: calling a lover by his last name. A number of my gay male friends do so under certain circumstances-especially the Brit/Euro ones. However, in THIS segment when Sev refers to Remy as "Professor Lupin" he's just, um, being Snape. Just because he's been in love for several months doesn't mean he's done a PERFECT 180. Have fun, folks! Enjoy... (I hope!) - S.]

"The Reunion"

II. The Day of Reckoning

Lunch was a fiasco. I picked at my food as though it was infested with maggots, like some of the worst fare in Azkaban. Severus chose to stare at his plate dyspeptically, without eating so much as a forkful of its contents. Remus boycotted the meal altogether. Grace and Elaine ate heartily enough but were atypically subdued in their lack of conversation-and they looked as nervous as squirrels darting across a country road ahead of a lorry. As soon as decently possible, Snape and I excused ourselves from table and headed towards Grace's guest room so that I could have my conference with Lupin. No one, upstairs or down, was comfortable. In fact, we felt as oppressed by the psychic atmosphere as we might have from the stifling heat, heavy humidity, and pent-up electricity of an approaching thunderstorm on a summer night. Not good!

Moony had done his best to get the room ready for our chat. The guest- room bed was spread up with the exacting neatness that he displays when under great emotional stress. The tops of the desk and the dresser were cleared of all clutter. Two wing chairs from our hostess's upstairs parlour had been shoehorned into a space between window and bed somewhat too small to accommodate them-with the result that their occupants could only sit facing straight ahead, unable to turn comfortably to look at one another. As we entered the room, Remus greeted me from one of the chairs.

"Hello, Sirius," he began in a tense voice, pointing to the empty chair beside him. "I'd meant for you to sit here, but I wasn't able to position the bloody thing properly. The one at the writing desk is out of the question, too. It's halfway across the room." He looked at Snape and added, "Sev, as our ombudsman, would you be comfortable taking it? I don't reckon you'll have to physically subdue any quarrels between us."

"Likely not, Remy," Snape agreed dryly, not attempting to hide a wry smile as he folded his tall frame into the sturdy Windsor chair.

"Thank you," Remus replied. Looking at me, he asked, "May I impose upon you to sit on the bed, Sirius? It's not uncomfortable. I perch there myself sometimes-but I'm hardly in the mood at the moment, if it's all the same to you."

I deliberately ignored the criticism inherent in his remark. I nodded and made myself as relaxed as possible on the edge of the bed, facing him.

"So. What do you want to say to me?" he continued-giving me a forced smile that would have made me angry had his eyes not been so obviously edgy above it.

I cleared my throat, hoping to dispel my own anxiety. "I know that I asked to talk to you, Remy," I began, "but at the moment I'd rather listen to you. I know that you're unhappy about how we parted, when James and Lily were killed. Will you tell me what life was like for you after I left?"

Moony frowned. "I hadn't expected you to ask me about that! I'd assumed that you just wanted to tell me that I was wrong to be unhappy and have done with it. I'm not sure that I want to tell you how things were. I certainly hadn't planned to-and you've never seemed all that interested in my experiences before. Why the sudden change of heart?"

I winced. It hurt to acknowledge, even to myself, that I've been so anxious to elicit Remus's compassion by sharing my own tale of woe with him that I haven't been particularly interested in hearing what happened to him. Also my 'change of heart' was the fruit of guilty knowledge. Thanks to Snape's visit last night, I know a great deal more about what happened to Remus after the Law Enforcement wizards turned me over to the dementors of Azkaban.

"A picture is worth a thousand words," the Muggles say. Some are worth even more, of course! And that's even truer of wizards' photographs. Severus showed me three powerful ones last night-one taken at the time of each of Moony's admissions to the emergency receiving-ward at St. Mungo's during my absence. Those dreadful images made me want to understand what had befallen him and how it impacted upon his life. They pricked my conscience and opened my heart to his pain. I have no choice now but to hear his story, will he but share it with me. Yet how can I answer his question? Snape stole the photos from Dumbledore; and Moony, as like as not, won't be pleased that he's shared them with me. What to say?

Severus moved from his chair to slouch against the wardrobe, putting himself into the corner of my visual field. I turned to stare at him for a long moment, mentally begging him to consent to my explaining last night's events to Remus. I do not want to lie to Lupin! Not if, in good conscience, I can refrain. After what seemed like an eternity, Snape walked over to Remus and placed a parchment packet in his hand. "I showed these to Sirius when I arranged this meeting, love," he explained quietly, "because he needed to understand the enormity of your situation."

When Lupin opened the package and saw what was inside, he went as white as chalk. He gasped before asking, "Oh, God! Where did you get these? And why-how-could you have let him see them?"

"I got them from the Headmaster, Moony-" Severus replied, " without telling him that I was borrowing them, I might add. So I'd be grateful if you didn't enlighten Dumbledore about my having appropriated them. I plan to return them to him, equally surreptitiously, at the earliest opportunity. As your guardian and friend, Albus obtained them from St. Mungo's in order to document the abuse that you've been subjected to over the years. He believes that some day our thick-witted fellow wizards will regret what they've done to you-and to the rest of your kind. He says that when they do, they'll need pictures like these to remind them not to go down that path again. As for why I let Black see them...Remy, he couldn't imagine all that was done to you after he was sent to Azkaban. He didn't want to! What happened to you is insufferable, despite the fact that you somehow lived through it-just as what happened to him in Azkaban is insufferable. It hurt him to give it much thought. So he had to see the pictures in order to understand that what happened to you truly was as awful as what had happened to him. I hope you'll forgive me, but I did what I believed...what I still believe...needed to be done."

For a moment, Remus hesitated. In that moment, all three of us knew that he might decide that Snape's behavior was unforgivable. That would leave Moony all alone, with more pain than ever before; because he'd never let either of us get close to him again. I found myself praying more fervently than I knew that I was able to for him to accept Severus's behavior for what it was-genuine concern for his well-being and an heroic willingness to risk their relationship (which means so much to Snape!) in order to help the two of us be reconciled. Finally Lupin's face softened and he reached out shyly to take Severus's hands in his own. "I do forgive you, Sev," he answered gently. "I can't say that I'm happy with what you did. But I accept that you did it with the best of intentions-and I don't reckon that Sirius will use having seen those pictures to hurt me in any way." He looked at me, with an odd mixture of fear and defiance in his eyes. "You found it easy enough to abandon me for the sake of your own ego, of course; but I can't imagine your deliberately holding me up to ridicule or contempt."

I wanted to scream at the top of my lungs, "Damn it, Remy! I didn't abandon you. Stop saying that I did," but I resisted the impulse. Remus Lupin is fair, kind, and gentle, except when the moon changes him-and at one time he was my lover, my spouse, and my best friend. I know him well enough to know that he'd never speak ill of me unless he thought that his accusations were truthful and just. They aren't, but he believes that they are. In some way that I don't clearly understand, it would overload his ability to cope with what happened to him were he to think otherwise. Nor can he pick his fear and pain apart as easily as he undoes his anger. Whether it's fair or not, I'll have to help him if I want him to take me back into his heart. What I heard myself say, almost in a whisper, is "No, darling. I would never deliberately harm you, in any way."

He nodded and tried so hard to give me a smile touched with his customary warmth that I nearly wept. "I know that, Siri," he replied. "I know that you bear no ill-will towards me. But what you did caused me so much pain! I could never endure that happening again. That's why I can't bear to get close to you. What if you went away again, forever?"

In the sunny brightness of Grace Wedmore's guest room, what he said sounded almost craven to me; and Gryffindor that I am I despise all cowardice and longed to tell him to stop being so weak. But Remus isn't a coward, any more than I am when I wake up with my heart racing because I've dreamed of Azkaban. I've learned the hard way that there are things in this world that fill even the bravest and noblest among us with fear and shame. The well-fed and neatly dressed middle-aged Remus Lupin sitting before me didn't decide to keep a safe distance from me. The badly hurt young man in the first of Dumbledore's photographs did. Being close to me had brought a terrible "retribution" down upon him.

The image rises in my mind unbidden, unwilled. Snape's right. I'd never in a million years choose to see Remy looking like that! At twenty-three years old, he's wasted, gaunt, and almost skeletally thin. His eyes are sunken and dull, empty of everything except pain, shame, and terror. Not even the rage that I saw in my own eyes in the cracked mirror of the wardrobe in the Shrieking Shack the night that I finally caught up with Peter Pettigrew smoulders in my lover's eyes. It's obvious that his body is badly bruised, abraded, and lacerated, because the Healer documenting the violence done to him and charged with treating him callously ripped away the sheet that Moony had wrapped himself in. Remus is shivering violently in the photo. I don't know whether that's because he was cold, going into shock, ashamed, or afraid of what was going to be done to him next. Probably he experienced all of those things in the fragment of his life that the snapshot captured.

From what Severus told me, I know that submitting to that bastard of a resident's "care" was, in its way, worse than enduring the beating that had landed him in St. Mungo's emergency receiving-ward. The scum who had slapped, punched, and kicked Remus repeatedly-and who would have killed him had a passing wizard not drawn his wand and ordered them to stop-were from the dregs of our community. They were unemployed Squibs, lacking in intelligence, ambition, and self- esteem. On the other hand, the angry Healer in the photograph was a highly respected professional. Yet he was the first person to openly speak of my lover as "that thing" and "it" in Remy's hearing. Lupin's doctor hated him-for being a werewolf, for having been my lover, for God alone knows what other reasons-but he was all that stood between Moony and death. According to Severus, his informant told him that the doctor's words to Remus as he tore the sheet away were, "Damn you, Lupin, let me do my work and get you out of here! You disgust me." I reckon that hearing that and being treated utterly without compassion must have been as terrible as being fed and cared for (however perfunctorily) by dementors in Azkaban. There was a time when, given a choice, I would have killed myself to escape such care. Poor Moony didn't have that option. Werewolves are unable to commit suicide. All that he could do was endure that angry son of a bitch's treatment as a cruel sequel to a vicious beating. I know that...now.

After much thought, Remus finally answered my question. "I don't know what to tell you," he began. "You're asking about things that happened a long time ago." "But by their very nature you must remember them vividly, Remy," I protested. He looked at the first of the three pictures again and went red-faced- I have no idea whether from embarrassment, anger, or both. "Oh, yes," he acknowledged bitterly, "but what's the point of telling you, Sirius? It won't change anything that happened, will it?"

"It can change what will happen now," I insisted.

I wasn't ready for the harsh laugh and twisted smile that my statement elicited. I flinched. For whatever reason, that freed up Lupin's anger long enough for him to blurt out, "Damn it! What do you care? You didn't care what would happen to me when you ran off to play the hero, did you? You never cared about anything except being a 'brave and noble Gryffindor'. I was just there to cheer you on-and to put out when you were feeling horny!"

Before I could object, he stopped and went pale. For a long moment, he sat there looking horrified and confused. I was so shocked and hurt that I didn't dare say anything. Suddenly Remy looked at Severus and asked, "Why did I say such dreadful things to him?" Then he burst into tears.

Snape moved to Remus's side and crouched in front of him, drawing him into a protective embrace. "I'm not exactly sure, love," he told him, "but apparently-to some extent-you're afraid that what you're saying is true, and you need to know whether it is or not."

Moony nodded before looking at me and demanding in a desperate and desolate voice, "Please tell me that it isn't true, Sirius. Please!"

My paralysis broke. "It isn't," I assured him. "Remus, I'm beginning to understand why you think it is, but it's not true!"

"Then why did you leave me that night? I don't understand. I've never understood. I needed you!"

"I know." I drew a ragged breath, to steady my voice and quiet my nerves. "I'd like to touch you while I tell you my side of it, sweetheart. I just want to hold your hands like Severus did. I won't do anything else, I promise. But will you let me do that much? Please?"

"Why?" came his bewildered response.

"Oh God!" I murmured. "Because I do care about you, Remy-and always have. Very much!"

I stepped closer as Snape simultaneously drew away from him. I sat on my heels and held out my hands to Remus but didn't touch him without his permission. Suddenly he seized them in his own crushing grip and asked, "Do you? Is that true, Siri?" He searched my face carefully for a truth that he needed as desperately as a man lost in a desert for many days needs water.

"Yes, love. There's nothing truer in my life," I told him. "I never meant for you to be alone. I never meant for anyone to hurt you because you were my lover. I never imagined what was going to happen to you when I left you that night." Suddenly he released my hands and flung his arms around my neck. I longed to return his embrace but I had promised him that I wouldn't. He whispered, "Hold me. Please hold me!"

I nodded and drew him onto the floor beside me. Then I coaxed him to follow me as I scooted across the carpet till my back was braced against the wardrobe. I pulled him onto my lap and wrapped my arms around him. I held him close for a very long time, without saying anything. Snape brought us a glass of water, and I shared it with Remus whose throat was raw from weeping. Still holding him, I began to explain to Moony why I'd gone haring into the night fifteen years ago-leaving him to fend for himself as best he could.

"I owed it to Peter to try to help him, darling."

"But he was the traitor!" Lupin objected.

"I'd just realized that. But he was also our friend. He had been for over a decade. I wasn't sure that he hadn't done what he did while under an Imperius. Or that he hadn't been tortured until he broke. Anyone can break under torture, Remy. Don't you know that?"

Reluctantly he nodded.

"I didn't know then what I know now," I continued, "so I couldn't leave him to his fate. I already felt like such a failure! I'd gotten James and Lily killed, and Albus wasn't going to let me raise Harry, as I'd promised to. I'd let everyone down." I paused and sighed. "Except you. You're right about one thing: I just had to be the brave and noble Gryffindor in the hope of repairing my tarnished self-image, of doing enough good to make up for the mischief that I'd set into motion by oh so cleverly changing our friends' Secret Keeper. So I went Apparating off to play the hero, Pettigrew framed me, and you were left by yourself to deal with a sorry pack of idiots who wanted to think the worst of you. But, Remus, please listen to me. I never abandoned you. Abandonment is the conscious choice to forsake someone. I never did that! I will never abandon you. I let that dirty little rat lure me into his trap and I lost my freedom. My mistake sullied your name and left you unprovided for, unprotected, and terribly alone-much to my endless consternation. But I would never deliberately have done any of that to you. If I'd truly known what Peter had become and that he'd done it of his own free will, I'd have left him to his fate in a heartbeat. I look at those pictures of you, darling, and I'm sick with grief and guilt."

Moony ran a trembling hand along my jaw and throat. "For a long time I thought that I wanted you to feel guilty, Siri," he admitted, "but I don't now. It's so confusing! Everyone told me that you were guilty, so I believed them-even though they told me that I was guilty, too, and I knew that I wasn't. I should have known that you were innocent. But I couldn't bear the thought of it. It was bad enough to think that you were guilty and that I was alone with everyone hating me because of you. I'm so sorry!"

"There's nothing to be sorry about," I reminded him. "We forgave one another for the doubts that we had about each other almost three years ago now. Part of what was so bad about that time was that Voldemort had all of us doubting one another. I thought the worst of you, too. But done is done, darling! We've already forgiven each other and you needn't reproach yourself anymore for having misjudged me."

His hand caressed my face and came to rest over my heart centre. "Even when I thought that you were guilty, I wanted you, Sirius. God help me, I wanted you so much! Until our house was firebombed, I dreamed that..."

"Firebombed?" I interrupted him. "Someone burned down our house?"

"Yes."

My heart pounded in my chest. "Were you there when it happened, Remus?"

"Yes, but it wasn't hard to get out. Whoever did it pitched the bomb through the parlour window, and I was out in the kitchen making my supper. I ran out the back door in time to see him run away."

"Who was it?"

"I'm not sure. It was at dusk and he was bundled up in black. My eyes were watering from the smoke. It could have been any of several blokes in the Hollow, actually."

"Didn't you recognize his scent?"

Remus laughed. "Not with any certainty, Siri. I'd gotten a nose full of smoke and petrol fumes, as well."

"But our house was destroyed?"

"Oh, yes!"

"Where did you go?"

"Different places," he answered evasively. "I tried to stay with my folks at first, but I...There were threats and I wasn't willing to put them at risk. So I just moved on. A few times. Several times. No one would rent to me, so I stayed in caves and such for a while. Rather like you in your cave outside Hogsmeade. Actually, it was of no great import that they weren't renting to me after the first few months, because no one would give me work and I soon ran out of money."

"What happened then?"

He frowned. "The Headmaster sent me to stay with a friend in the States-but I made a mistake and had to come home."

It was my turn to frown. "Remus, did Professor Davies have any idea what she was sending you back to the UK to face?"

"No, of course not!" he answered indignantly. "I didn't want her to know, because...because she might have let me stay out of pity; and I didn't want to go from being loved to being pitied. Besides, I honestly thought that with my having been gone for a month things might have calmed down."

"But they hadn't?"

He shook his head and a look of heartbreaking sadness clouded his beautiful face. "No."

"So you were back here among us with no home and no job."

"That's right."

I pointed to the picture, where it lay on the floor beside Remy's wing chair. "And you damned near let yourself starve to death! Why, Remus? Albus would have found you a safe place to stay and seen that you at least had food, if you'd let him."

He shrugged. "It wasn't safe-and I wasn't that bad off, Sirius."

"The hell you weren't!" I exploded. I jabbed my finger towards the photo taken at St. Mungo's. "Remy, you're not just beaten up in that picture. You're half dead from hunger, too. You weren't any thinner when you...when Severus saved your life this summer. Why did you do that to yourself? Why wouldn't you let the Headmaster help you?"

"I'm a werewolf, Sirius," he replied in a hurt voice. "I couldn't stay at the castle-and Dumbledore didn't have anywhere else to send me at the time."

"Why the hell couldn't you have stayed at Hogwarts?" I demanded. "No one could bloody well have fire-bombed the school!"

"I couldn't have done that," he protested. "The children..."

"Goddamn it, Remus! The other students were safe for seven years while you attended Hogwarts. Seven years. Close to a hundred lunations. All you had to do was let Madame Pomfrey lock you up at the full moon."

He turned in my arms to face me. "It wasn't the same as when we were boys," he told me gravely. "The situation was much the same as it was three years ago. The public was aware of what I am. You're right that they couldn't have burned down the castle; but they could, and would, have taken their children out of school. I couldn't be the cause of that. So I found a safe place to winter over and got by as best I could. I didn't do too badly."

I groaned.

He gave me a quick hug and the warmth and weight of his body pressed against mine filled me with longing-not lust. I remained unaroused sexually. But I was consumed with the desire to make peace with this remarkable man and spend the rest of my days in his company.

"I was still alive and able to take reasonably good care of myself after being homeless and jobless for over a year," he continued. "Not bad that! I think that you ought to be proud of me."

"I'm very proud of you! But that doesn't mean that I can't be amazed and appalled at just how little help that you received in 'getting by'. That was criminal of our wizardly peers, Remy-truly criminal. And I would especially like to see some Ministry officials and Law Enforcement Wizards held accountable for the abuse and neglect that you endured."

Moony nodded. "I'd like to see that, too, if the truth be told. But you mustn't tilt any windmills to see that justice is belatedly done, my dear. And especially not until your name is cleared. I absolutely do not want you back in Azkaban, or dead! Whatever begrudged assistance I might receive would never be worth that."

"I suppose not," I agreed despondently, "but you can't begin to imagine how awful it feels not to have protected you and not to be able to obtain justice for you now. What kind of man does that make me, not to take care of my own mate?"

Remus sighed, "One with major problems of his own to deal with. And I haven't exactly done an exemplary job of taking care of you these past fifteen years either, have I? I think it's best that we forgive each other, and ourselves, for not having been paragons of male virtue and get on with our lives, Sirius. Don't you?"

I nodded. "It won't be easy, but I suppose you're right. Remy, I...I wanted to take good care of you, from the day that I met you."

He blushed and favoured me with one of his mysterious but beatific smiles. "I know that. And you've done very well, all in all. And one of the things that I learned while you were in Azkaban is that I don't have to be taken care of as much as I'd thought. It wasn't a pleasant lesson, but it's something that I'm glad to know. It makes me feel better about myself-and less afraid." He gave a mischievous little snort, a sound that I remembered very well from our days at Hogwarts. "So thanks for letting me down a bit. It served a good purpose!"

I laughed despite myself. It was-and sounded like-a sob as much as laughter, but my acceptance of Lupin's skewed humour was genuine. I've always loved his ability to de-fuse his suffering through irony and gentle mockery. "Would you like to get up and sit somewhere more comfortable?" I asked.

"Oh, is my stout little Welsh body getting too heavy for your lap?"

"Not at all, but this rock-solid oak wardrobe is getting far to too hard for my decrepit back."

He stood up and gave me his hand. Once I was on my feet, he headed back to the wing chair.

"Wait!" I protested. "Is there any reason why you shouldn't sit beside me on the bed, Remus?"

"I suppose not," he admitted.

"Then grab the other two pictures and come join me-all right?"

He froze. "Surely there's no need..."

I wasn't certain what to say. On the one hand, I didn't want to put Moony through any unnecessary mental anguish; on the other, I genuinely wanted to understand all that had happened to him while I was gone. I felt somewhat afraid that, given the chance to avoid talking it out with me now, Remus would never discuss it with me at all. Furthermore, I knew that, if he didn't discuss it with me, all our good intentions notwithstanding his resentment (and mine!) might easily return.

Apparently my silence was eloquent. He murmured, "I guess there is," and stooped to gather up the wizards' photos.

Snape interrupted before I could speak. "Remus, there are advantages to your talking about those snapshots, but neither of us can insist that you do so." "He's right," I added. "In fact, I was going to tell you that myself."

Moony laughed and shook his head. "Sometimes you two amaze me! Gentlemen, if I didn't want to discuss these lovely little slices of my life with you, I promise you that you couldn't force me to with a bloody Imperius. A Cruciatus perhaps, but definitely not an Imperius!" He plopped onto the edge of the bed beside me and handed me the photographs.

I studied the second one for a long time. As had been the case the previous night, it confused me. In some ways it resembled the first photo, but there were differences. For one thing, Remus was decently covered. He'd wrapped an examining-table sheet around his waist and was clutching it tightly in place, but the resident-who was being courteous and reasonably gentle-appeared to be listening to his heart and lung sounds, which meant there was good reason for Lupin's chest and upper back to be uncovered. Although my lover was somewhat underweight, he was not horribly emaciated. He was a few years older than in the first picture but definitely still in his twenties. He appeared to be ill as well as injured. He was red-faced, glassy-eyed, and blank looking, as though from a fever. After a moment, a series of wracking coughs that left him gasping for breath confirmed my impression that he was sick. Although he was badly bruised and abraded, his most pronounced injuries were a series of jagged lacerations scattered about his trunk and arms-and, judging from one running along his right ankle, possibly his legs as well. What makes wounds like that? I asked myself. They're familiar. I should know... Nor was Moony displaying "brave and noble Gryffindor" stoicism in this photograph. He was crying disconsolately. What in the name of heaven had happened to him this time?

I cleared my throat self-consciously before observing, "Sweetheart, you're obviously both sick and hurt in this picture. Did some one assault you while you were too ill to defend yourself, or were you assaulted and left to fend for yourself so that you sickened afterwards from exposure?"

"Neither exactly. I still didn't have a job or money for lodging, so I'd been staying in the Cotswold, living off fish and small animals and nuts and berries and such. Off whatever I could scavenge actually, plus what I could earn from a bit of day labour now and then. Winter was coming in a few more weeks, and I was worried about where to stay. Anyhow several days before the full moon, I came down with a chest cold that turned into pneumonia. I should have gone to St. Mungo's right away, but I really hate dealing with doctors and hospitals. You know that."

I nodded. Poppy Pomfrey used to claim that she had never seen two children as averse to medical care as Remus Lupin and Severus Snape. I don't know what Severus hates about putting himself at the mercy of Healers, but it doesn't take any N.E.W.T.s to comprehend Remus's distaste for the experience. Every full moon since he was three he's had the opportunity to re-experience how painful, humiliating, and useless all their poking, prodding, examinations, and treatments can be. When we were living together in Godric's Hollow all those long years ago, Moony lay abed while his appendix ruptured rather than go to St. Mungo's werewolf ward for diagnosis and medical care. When I asked him about it afterwards, he told me, "My gut hurt, dear. I figured sooner or later it would stop hurting. I thought that I'd just wait it out and not have to deal with the system."

I tapped the photograph. "What happened when you didn't go to St. Mungo's as soon as you realized how sick you were?"

He sighed. "When the full moon arrived, I was too weak to Apparate there; so I had two choices."

"To hide in the forest and resist the impulse to hunt human prey once you changed," I acknowledged, "or to turn yourself in to the local authorities."

"That's right. So I opted for surrendering myself to the local authorities. There was a little village-mostly of wizarding folk-not far from where I'd been staying in the woods. The sheriff and all his deputies were wizards. I went to him and claimed my right to be locked up for 'the common good'. What I didn't know was that the village had a very small holding pen-and another werewolf. A female werewolf."

I gasped and shuddered despite myself, uncomfortably sure of where his story was headed. "Then what happened, darling?" I inquired nervously-with a weak smile that likely looked as forced to him as it felt to me.

He studied me carefully before answering. "Ingrid-that was their werewolf's name-was menstruating. What do you suppose happened, Sirius?"

I knew, of course, but I couldn't force myself to answer him-damn me!

He nodded. "I see that you get the general picture, so I won't elaborate on it overly much. The moon rose, we changed, and I raped her-repeatedly."

"No," I protested. "No, no, no! You weren't responsible... You couldn't help yourself."

"No, I couldn't," he answered grimly, "which didn't help poor Ingrid, did it?" Again I couldn't think of what to say. When Remus stood and I knew that he was about to leave the room, I grabbed his wrists hoping desperately to detain him until I could find words to express my feelings. I knew that he thought that I despised him, which I did not.

Lupin struggled to escape until I lost hold of one of his wrists, and then he ordered me to let go of him. When I ignored his demand, he began flailing at me with his free arm. The edge of his large, strong hand caught me across the bridge of the nose and started it bleeding. My blood gushed onto Remus and he stared at it in horror. When I released my grip on his other wrist in order to express assurance of my love and trust, he darted for the door.

Snape intercepted him. He didn't try to lay hold of Lupin, but he used his lanky, broad-shouldered body to block his egress.

"There's nothing else that I have to say to Sirius," Remus told Severus with as defiant a voice as he could muster.

"Don't be so sure, my sweet man," Snape replied. "Perhaps Azkaban has worn the rough edges off your paramour's air of moral superiority."

I bristled but did not speak.

Remy shook his head. "I raped that girl," he insisted.

"No. At the time that you had sex with her, you were incompetent by virtue of temporary lunacy. So was she, for that matter," Severus added morosely.

"That doesn't change the fact that she got sexually assaulted, does it?"

"No, love," Snape replied gently, resting a hand on Lupin's shoulder.

I was furious! How could he say that to Remus? How dared he! I was well on my way to literally seeing red when Moony let Severus draw him into a comforting embrace.

"Nothing can change that," Snape added, stroking Remy's hair. "I won't deny that."

"And that was the worst thing that I could ever do, except kill and feed."

"Yes," Severus agreed, in a soothing voice. "It was. But you never did anything like that before that particular full moon and you've never done anything like it since. Nor would you have done it then, had you been given any choice. That cretinous sheriff and his moronic deputies, on the other hand, had every opportunity not to sexually assault either Ingrid or you. And they did assault both of you. I looked the laws up after you first told me what had happened. Under our law and the Muggles', those men were guilty of sexual assault by virtue of forcing both of you to commit non-consensual sex acts, as well as of raping Ingrid and of battering you. They should be in Azkaban-or a Muggle maximum-security prison, darling; and, if you're ever willing, the Headmaster and I will see to it that they are locked up for the rest of their disgusting lives."

Remus shook his head vehemently. "I'm neither brave enough nor foolish enough to bring charges against 'respectable wizards', Sev. I'm just grateful that you don't hate me for what I did."

Severus gave him an uneasy smile. "I could never do that, my darling man. I understand the difference between a victim and a rapist perfectly well."

"As do I, Remus," I said quietly. "What happened was dreadful, and I want to kill that swine of a sheriff and all his friends for having put you, and the young lady, through it. But you aren't responsible. I know you well enough to know that you must consider that cold comfort, but you did what you did in all innocence, as did Ingrid. And what happened doesn't change my love for you in the least."

"But when I was telling you, you wouldn't say anything!"

"I didn't know what to say! It wasn't anything that I could gloss over and it wasn't anything for which I can blame you, and I simply didn't know what to say." I shook my head, "Why is it always so hard for me to find the right words to comfort you, Remy? I love you. I swear I do. And I don't judge you. I swear I don't. But I can't seem to get the right words out to help you feel better. Bloody Snape can, but I can't! What the hell's the matter with me?"

"Not a damned thing is wrong with you, Black," Severus muttered. "You just worry yourself into silence from time to time-and our friend here doesn't deal all that well with pregnant silences, do you, Remy?"

Remus half turned in his arms to face me. "No, I don't," he acknowledged. "I don't deal well with them at all."

"Which is why you need to let Sirius hold you when the cat's got his tongue," Snape continued.

"No! I can't," Moony argued.

"And why is that, Professor Lupin?" Severus asked almost banteringly. "You let me hold you when the kitty has abducted my tongue, and you invited Mr. Black to hold you a very short time ago. What, pray tell, is the difference?"

"You don't think I'm awful anymore, and..."

"Goddamn it, Remus!" I roared. "I don't think you're awful. Will you please get that through that thick skull of yours? I...do...not...think...you're...awful! I didn't think so when we were eleven and I'd just found out that you're a werewolf. I didn't think it when I became your lover or when I married you. And I certainly don't think it now. If I've ever actually met a saint, you're it."

"Saints don't enjoy buggering or have an inordinate fondness for chocolate, Sirius."

"Oh, stop that! You know what I'm saying, Remy."

He nodded. "But the last year that we were married you did think that I was awful. You thought that I'd gone over to the Enemy. What's to stop you from thinking something like that again?"

"Having learned from my own stupidity! Doubting you was the worst mistake of my life. If I'd bothered to listen to my heart at the time, James and Lily would still be alive, I wouldn't have gone to Azkaban, and you wouldn't have spent fifteen years of your life at the mercy of a pack of dirty-minded, mean-spirited, self-righteous idiots, who don't know the meaning of the word 'mercy'. Oh, yes, and we might well have rid ourselves of Tom Effing Marvolo Riddle the first time around!"

"You...you blame yourself for all that?"

"Yes!"

Remus frowned. "You shouldn't, you know. I was innocent, but..."

"Remy, I'd known you long enough not to believe all our prejudices about werewolves. Don't you know that?"

He nodded. "Yes. I do know that, but there was circumstantial evidence that I might have gone over-or even been put under a curse. You're not God omniscient to have known for sure, Siri. It hurt like hell that you doubted me, but I really did understand. It's just...I wish you'd accused me of something, so that I could have defended myself!"

"I know. But I couldn't. If you had been the traitor..."

"It wouldn't have done for me to know that you'd seen through my feigned innocence."

We both sighed heavily. I held my arms out to Lupin and he moved into them hesitantly. Snape went back to his chair at the desk. When Remus and I let go of each other, I quietly led him back to the bed; but I crouched on the floor in front of him rather than sharing it with him. "Who wounded you like that?" I finally asked.

"Why I did, Sirius-just like I used to before you and James and Peter learned the Animagus Transformation. I was so frustrated the last night of that full moon! I wanted to stop hurting Ingrid, and I wanted to escape, and I wanted to kill myself (even though I knew that I couldn't), and I wanted to tear the sheriff and his cronies to blood-soaked tatters. The night passed more slowly than you can possibly imagine, and I got angrier and angrier and angrier. So finally I started biting and clawing at myself. I wish I'd thought of it sooner. I passed out from blood loss and didn't do anything else to Ingrid. Why didn't I think of it the first night?"

I shook my head and stood to enfold Remy in my arms. "Darling, you shouldn't have to harm yourself to protect someone else! You...No one should have to do what you did. James and Peter and I hoped that you'd never go back to hurting yourself the way that you had as a boy."

"I have a lot more scars now, Sirius. Do you forgive me? When I'm locked up I can't help myself. And I was thirty before it occurred to me that the centaurs might help me."

"What?" Snape and I asked together.

"I finally realized that I didn't have to go to St. Mungo's or to a local lock-up. I asked the centaurs in the Forbidden Forest to keep me from doing harm to anyone. They agreed to constrain me, like you do. That's why I ran into the Forest the night that you drove me away from the children and Snape, Siri. I knew that once I was in, they wouldn't let me back out before moonset. I moved down to Devonshire a few months later, after a new stallion took charge of the herd. He doesn't like humans at all, and-can you believe it? -he swears that I'm just one more human that he has no intention of dealing with ever again."

"Smart centaur," Severus remarked sourly.

"What?" Lupin asked, graceful eyebrows rising quizzically.

"The damned beast is aware that you're a human being, which makes him ever so much brighter than most wizards and witches of my acquaintance," Snape explained. "Myself included for many years. Nevertheless, there was obviously a jackass somewhere in his ancestry for him to have withdrawn his people's aid to you."

Remus gave a shuddering laugh and freed himself from my hold. "Best you not tell him that, Sev," he remarked mildly. "He'd kick you so hard that Poppy would refuse to release you for-oh, three days' minimum, I should think." He turned back to me. "Have I said enough about the bloody photograph, Sirius?" he asked wearily.

I nodded and squeezed his hand. "Yes, darling. You've said quite enough."

"Well, shall we have a look at the last one then?" he inquired. "I'd as soon have it over and done with, at this point."

"Are you sure that you're up for it, Remus?"

"Oh, yes," he answered me, almost cheerfully. "There's not a lot that I can tell you about this one. I was brought into the receiving ward unconscious, and I stayed that way for a full lunation. And although my memory of what led up to my being beaten into a coma has improved, there are still significant gaps in it. Gaps you could drive a Muggle lorry through, in fact. So fire away and I'll answer as best as I can," he concluded-with a smile that wasn't so much insincere as smugly content about his incapacity to enlighten me. I studied the picture carefully, searching out a key that would open its mysteries to me. None presented itself. This photo is so lacking in animation that one might, at first glance, mistake it for a Muggle snapshot. Moony is unconscious on the examining table. Except for the Healer's hand occasionally entering the frame to work magic, the only movement in the image is Lupin's slow, shallow breathing. He's obviously naked beneath the sheet covering his abdomen and legs; and yet he's been carefully draped-whether to preserve his modesty, to keep him warm, or both, I can't tell. He's also been carefully cleaned up. Someone has wiped the blood from his wounds. As for those wounds, they're dreadful-especially the ones to his normally lovely face. Remus was my lover for almost six years before I went to Azkaban, and one of my greatest pleasures has always been looking at his face. I can tell you from memory details of how he looked at sixteen or twenty-one, as surely as if I was consulting a photograph. In the snapshot from St. Mungo's, his face is so badly damaged that I'm only certain that I'm looking at Moony because I recognize his torso and arms and the pattern of scars that cover them. That sounds unbelievable, but it's true! Both of his eyes are swollen shut, with his eyelids and the whole orbital area angry red, well on its way to turning blackish purple. I can tell from an odd dimple below his right eye that the bone beneath it has been pulverized. His left ear is semi-detached, more than half ripped from his head, and is also swollen and bruised. His nose has been broken in two places. His mouth is bloody, turning dark, puffy, and twisted, with bits of white grit embedded in his lower lip that I realize (to my horror) are fragments of his shattered front teeth. His jaw is either dislocated or perhaps fractured-it's difficult to say which. Suddenly I catch myself silently blessing the resident who cared for Remy. Had he fallen back upon the prevalent, "Who cares? It's just a filthy werewolf!" thinking so typical of our medical profession, my lover would have been horribly disfigured for life. Instead the hands moving deftly in and out of the picture painstakingly set healing charms on each of Remus's facial injuries before their owner sent Lupin to the werewolf ward, even though the Healer had no way of knowing at the time whether he would ever wake from the depths of his coma. I looked from the wizards' photo to Moony quietly sitting in front of me, and I damned near wept and I did begin to tremble uncontrollably. I took deep breaths to help me stay calm and reached out and traced the lines of my spouse's face, to remind myself that his attackers had not been allowed to efface his beauty permanently.

"When did this happen, Remus?" I finally asked, once I trusted myself not to lose control. "You obviously weren't in your twenties any more."

"No, my days as a beautiful lad were long over and done with," he answered with a plaintiveness that made me want to wince. "The photo's two or three years old."

I narrowed my eyes suspiciously. "This happened to you the year that I escaped from Azkaban," I stated decisively.

He shook his head and gave me an odd smile. "Actually, it happened to me in January of the following year. Roughly six months after I left Hogwarts."

I looked from Lupin to Snape and back to Lupin. "There's something I've never quite understood that I'd like to, Remus."

"What's that?"

"Harry Potter told me about the circumstances of your departure when we first began exchanging owls, soon after I'd left the UK. He said that Snape told his entire House about your lycanthropy, and they saw to it that everyone else at Hogwarts was aware of your condition before the breakfast dishes had been cleared away."

"That's right."

"But when I told the Headmaster that I wanted to flog Severus for having caused you to lose your job, he told me that Snape hadn't caused you to lose your job."

"That's also right. I resigned my post."

"Because you'd been outed?"

"Because I'd been a bloody fool and put innocent children at risk."

"But Severus wanted you to lose your job," I began.

"Indeed!" Snape interrupted. "I still wanted to believe that you were a murderer, Black. And I was furious that Lupin persisted in believing that you were innocent. And even more furious that he'd been involved in your getting away and, with you, the reward and recognition that I felt I deserved. I didn't precisely wander into the Slytherin Common Room planning to ruin Remus's good name, but I was cheesed off enough not to give a bloody damn about protecting it either. So when Mr. Crabbe announced to one and all that he'd spotted a naked man running towards the castle who 'must' be Sirius Black, I told him, 'No, you unspeakable cretin, that must have been Professor Lupin, freshly back from a night of scouring the Forbidden Forest for the fat haunch of a dunderhead such as yourself!'-or words to that effect. When the moron stammered, "Are you saying th-th-that P-P- Professor Lupin is a w-w-werewolf, sir?' I answered him, 'Of course, he's a werewolf, you incredible nitwit! Why else would he wander out of the Forbidden Forest au naturel just after moonset on the morning following the full moon?' 'Au na...nat... natural?' he continued. 'Naked, you idiot!' I snarled at him. After that little exchange, the in-House grapevine spread word of Remus's misadventure throughout our precincts at just under the speed of light. What with Slytherins being remarkably talented gossips and all, his fate was sealed. So, although Lupin doesn't blame me for his unemployment as DADA instructor, I do hold myself responsible. Does that clear things up for you, Sirius?" he asked almost arrogantly.

I was about to give him a singularly nasty affirmative when I realized that his haughty voice notwithstanding Severus Snape was fighting back tears.

"A moment, love," I told Moony and he nodded his consent.

Then I walked across the room to Severus and crouched before him as I had done with Lupin. "Actually, I need to ask you one more thing, Sev: Why not believe Remus when he tells you that you didn't get him sacked? He's a very honest man, and so's Dumbledore. And you yourself just said that you didn't plan what happened. Why not believe him and stop rubbing salt in your wounds?"

Moony had quietly joined us as I spoke. Snape stared up at him in bewilderment. "I'm sorry, Remus. This is supposed to help you and Sirius...not me. I should have kept my mouth shut!"

Lupin leaned over to kiss him on the mouth and cradle the back of his head in one of his big hands. Suddenly Severus was crying. I could scarcely believe it but tears were running down his face freely and he was sobbing till he shook from it. "Shh, Sev. Not to worry," Moony murmured. "His understanding you helps Siri comprehend how I can love you. It's germane. Besides, I want to know what helps or harms you. I love you, you daft prat. Live with it!"

He held Snape awhile longer, stroking his hair and giving him another kiss or two as he regained his composure. Then Remus clasped Severus's hand in his own and stood once more. "This is how I see it, you two," he explained carefully, as if to a pair of slightly slow children of whom he was nonetheless inordinately fond. "I resigned my post because I wanted to. I was quite put out with myself that morning." He shuddered at the memory. "Quite. Severus may have wanted me to go, and Albus definitely wanted me to stay-as did your godson, Sirius; but I left of my own free will, and I have no regrets or resentments about having done so. So, for my two knuts' worth, the art of gossip as practiced in Slytherin House is utterly irrelevant to what took place. As is Sev's angry dialog with Mr. Crabbe. Shall we three agree that my point of view is the correct one in this instance?"

After a moment's hesitation I nodded. Finally Snape did so as well. Remus smiled at me and gestured towards the bed. "Let's make ourselves comfortable and get to the end of this. As far as I'm concerned, there can't be too much more to say."

He sat back down in the wing chair and I sat on the floor facing him, leaning against the bed that he shares with Severus. "What happened to you, Remy, the night that this picture was taken?"

"The morning," he corrected. "The morning of the January full moon two years ago I crept back into a deserted warehouse-well outside the outskirts of a lovely farming community down in Dyfed -were I'd stashed my robes, to wait out my change back into human form. Fortunately for them, but not so fortunately for me, half a dozen drunken Squibs wandered in before I was, um, quite myself. One of them knew who I was and spouted the most lurid fantasies about how I'm able to use my werewolf appetites to destroy the evidence of my pedophilic lust towards small boys."

"Your what?" I asked in utter disbelief.

"The operative word in the previous sentence was 'fantasies', Sirius. But the bloke persuaded his cronies that his fantasies were indisputable facts. I was too weak from my transformations to fight them off; so, to put it crudely, they beat the shit out of me. I remember parts of what happened, but I wasn't too keen on staying grounded at the time. In fact, I recall fervently praying to die. I became rather more acquainted with the gents' fists, elbows, knees, and boots than I cared to, I promise you. Finally one of them slammed my head against the cement floor once too often and my consciousness went elsewhere for a solid month. I woke up in St. Mungo's just as the following full moon was commencing. Luckily for me, I was considered too frail for the general lock-up because of my brain damage and the weight that I'd lost while in the coma; so I got a private room that wasn't too filthy all to myself and anything that I wanted to eat while in human form. And once the full moon had passed, some chapel-goers donated a new set of robes, a ticket to Hogsmeade, and ten quid to get me away from their fair city."

"Why new robes?" I asked-rather stupidly as it turned out, but it kept the frightening questions about month-long comas and brain damage at bay.

"As I said, Sirius, my assailants were Squibs-just like the first time I got beaten senseless. The idea of a werewolf being a trained wizard doesn't set well with them. They don't think that it's fair that I received the training that they didn't. They burned my robes to make the point. According to the Law Enforcement Wizards, the evidence at the crime scene suggested that they meant to burn me, too."

"What!"

He shrugged. "It seems I'd been liberally doused with petrol, love, as had the area immediately surrounding me. It's all pied up in my mind, but I may have been threatened with getting gang-banged and burned afterwards. I know it's stupid that I'm not sure, but I dreamed-or hallucinated-many grotesque things during my coma; so I'm not entirely sure where reality ends and my nightmares begin."

Remus had tried valiantly to tell me all that without losing his composure; but in the end, he began to shake noticeably and became very withdrawn. I had no more questions to put to him. He can tell me anything else that he pleases in his own good time or I shall inquire of the Headmaster if I need information that Remus is not prepared to share with me. I'd been so sure that my lover's fate had been less cruel than mine! I was wrong. What was done to each of us was unforgivable. I cannot demand of him, "Forgive me because I suffered far more than you did." I can only hope to ease his suffering, as I hope that he that will be willing to help ease mine.

Severus joined us as Remus ended his recital of the events that led to his final journey to St. Mungo's emergency-receiving and werewolf wards. It was to him that Moony stretched out his arms, and it was Snape who held him and comforted him and helped him let go of the horrors that I had insisted that Lupin confide in me. In that moment, more than any other, I accepted the depth of love that exists between the two of them. It is-all my harsh moral judgments of Snape notwithstanding-beautiful and worthy of celebration.

I like to think that Remy and I loved one another as much as they do, when we were young men dreaming of brilliant careers and a long and happy relationship, before my sojourn in Azkaban. Perhaps we were, but perhaps not. I can't say with certainty. I would like to love Moony as much as Snape does now, but I no longer hope that he might let me. So perhaps the time has come to tell Remus Lupin goodbye.

"You love Severus very much," I said to him, after Snape had returned to his chair.

"Yes."

"Despite everything that he did to hurt you from the time that you were sixteen years old."

"Yes."

"You forgive him everything."

"Yes."

"Then why won't you forgive me?"

"I've forgiven you everything that you ever asked me to, Sirius, beginning when I was sixteen."

"Until tonight I never thought that I owed you an apology for leaving you to try and help Peter; but, in a way, I do. Will you forgive me for that, too?"

"Yes, of course."

"And will you let me love you again?"

"I don't know! I'm not sure that I trust you not to hurt me again."

"But you trust Severus not to hurt you again?"

Bewildered pain fills his eyes-and fear, the raw terrible fear that is the sum of the fear that the man in the three wizards' photographs has experienced. "Y-y-yes," he stutters in a strangled whisper. "I trust him, but not you. I love you, but..."

"That's not fair, Remy, and you know it," I answered him sadly, "but if hurting me heals you..."

"No," he said in a forlorn voice. "I've found that hurting you, or anyone else, only adds to my pain."

"Ah, Moony! We never wanted to hurt each other, but we've done a bloody lovely job of mucking things up, haven't we?"

My eyes felt hot and stung with unshed tears that began to spill down my cheeks. Remus caught one on a fingertip and stared at it in wonder. "Siri...I..."

"There's no hope for us, is there, Remy? You know, it's hard to be this close to you and not take you into my arms," I told him. "Mind you, I would never want to 'steal' you from Severus. I just want to love you, too, and not like a brother either, although... Damn it, I love you so much that I'd even settle for that, as painful as it would be!"

Remus looked very troubled and uncertain. "Not all that long ago you said that you didn't even want to be friends..."

"Oh, Moony! I do want to be friends--and more; but if we can't talk things out, what sort of relationship can we have? Severus and I used to be bitter enemies, but over these past few months we've managed to forge and maintain a workable friendship because we communicate with each other."

"I'm not Severus, Siri...and some things are hard for me to say."

"Goddamn it, Remus, I know that! Sometimes it seems that whatever I say to you is the wrong thing."

"I feel the same way."

"I'm sorry."

Remus shook his head. "You never used to apologize."

"I did but you never seemed to hear me, Remy." He looked downcast. "I want to be your friend! Even if we have to take it from Square One and start completely over." I held my hand out to him. "Hullo, Remus Lupin. I'm Sirius Black. How d'you do?"

To my amazement, he pulled me into a hug by my proffered hand. My head rested against his chest, so that I felt the powerful but rapid beating of his heart. He cradled my head in one strong hand and murmured reassurances to me that we were indeed friends and that everything would be all right. I felt so loved! I wrapped my arms around his waist and nestled closer to the warm comfort of his body. His encouragement re-kindled my longing to win Moony back. Suddenly I heard myself desperately asking unthinkably difficult questions: "Remy, what did you mean when you said that you love me? You're so happy to be in love with Snape. Did you ever love me like that, at all?"

My query shocked but didn't anger him. "Yes, of course I loved you, Siri," he answered with a look of chagrin on his face. "What a dreadful thing to ask! If I hadn't loved you, I would never have submitted to your embraces-or offered you mine." He sighed and a small shudder ran through him. "I still love you, sexually and emotionally." He blushed and stared at the floor. "That's why I can't let myself trust you and, most of the time, can't bear for you to touch me. I'm afraid that I'll succumb to my feelings for you and end up getting hurt again!"

I pulled back from him in horror. I wasn't appalled by what he had said. For the first time I was armed with the knowledge of what loving me had, in fact, cost my mate. I wanted to hold him and console him, but I was paralyzed. "I mustn't," I thought. "I mustn't! It will only make him more afraid of me." Despite my intention not to touch Remus uninvited, I reached out to him with one hand. With intense effort, I stopped before it could reach his shoulder. It came to a halt between us, shaking as if it were palsied.

Suddenly I was living the dream that I had early this summer. Remus stared at me in amazement and carefully took my hand in his own. To my astonishment, he kissed the back of it. Then he carefully turned it over and kissed its palm and each of my fingers. Then he reached out and cupped my face in his hand. His eyes were wet with tears, too. I leaned in close. Our lips met.

"Perhaps I'm not too afraid to give us a try, Siri," he stated gravely. "I miss you terribly. As much as I love Severus, it doesn't change what I feel for you. I want you both." He kissed me again, more passionately, and drew me back into his arms. Then his lips brushed against my cheek and neck repeatedly, as softly as snowflakes but warm-so warm-dissolving the cold despair that I've felt for so many months.

I tried to rise and return his kisses, but he was standing too close for me to do so; so I seized his hand and pressed my lips to it over and over, as tenderly and thoroughly as he had mine. As he continued to bend down and kiss me, he began to lean forward, pressing me backwards onto the bed. I gladly cooperated, leaving him space to scramble beside me. It was then that I saw Snape preparing to leave the room. He gave me a reassuring smile before turning the doorknob. Moony froze at the sound of the door opening. Then he gave me a quick kiss on the lips and jumped up to intercept Severus. "Don't leave me!" he begged. "I..." Snape silenced him with a kiss. "I have no intention of leaving you, Remus," he promised him, "if by that you mean giving you up." He traced the line of Lupin's jaw with his thumb and then retraced it with his lips. "But I'm leaving the farm for a while on an errand. It seems a good time to take care of it. Your reunion with Black has reached the point at which a negotiator is worse than useless." He stepped back from Moony to regard us both. "Enjoy yourselves, gentlemen. I'd say you've earned it."

I was completely nonplussed. "Severus, I...For heaven's sake, man! You don't have to leave. Remus and I can go elsewhere to do what we have in mind. I'm sure that you'd rather we didn't celebrate the resumption of our union in your bed!" Snape's laughter was as wild and fey as my sister's. Perhaps over the years her mannerisms have begun to rub off on him. "Don't be a bloody idiot, Black!" he insisted. "First off, this isn't my bed. It's Grace's. She can't wait for you and Lupin to resume making love, so I'm certain that she won't begrudge you the use of it. None of us will." He smiled at Remus. "The long-anticipated decrease in tension between you two will be an enormous relief to the rest of clan Wedmore, you know!" He turned back towards me. "Secondly, Professor Lupin is my lover, not my property-which means that he can share his body with whom he damned well pleases and I won't object. And lastly, as I've already stated, I have an errand elsewhere."

"Your errand seems very sudden, Sev," I remarked suspiciously.

"Well, it isn't! I was charged with it years ago," he observed cryptically, "but, until now, it would have been premature." He tilted Remus's face upward and shared a lingering, sensuous kiss with him. "I'll be back late tonight, darling, but I shan't disturb you before morning."

Moony sighed. "At least come tell me good night, all right?" I nodded my agreement to Remy's request.

Snape shrugged. "Very well, gentlemen. I promise to pop in long enough to tuck my moonchild in." Then he gave Remus a final fond kiss, waved to me, and was gone.


	3. Rediscovering Love

What happened when Severus left was fierce and swift. An outsider might have thought that it was brutal because of its suddenness and intensity, but it wasn't. In fact, it was one of the sweetest experiences of my life.

As Remus returned to the bed I quickly pulled my robes off and flung them to the floor, exposing myself-erection included-to his hungry gaze. Moony was wearing Muggle clothing, as he often does, to avoid unpleasant confrontations with other wizards as to whether or not he's a rightful member of our tribe. He got his jacket off without any problems; but when he tried to unfasten the many buttons of his shirt with trembling hands, he was unable to do so. I was reaching up to help him when, in exasperation, he simply ripped the garment off. I had never seen Remy do anything like that before! Between his self- discipline and his poverty, the gesture would have been unthinkable- but this beautiful stranger is freer and more financially secure than any Remus Lupin that I've ever known, and his mind is...different and, in some ways, more daring.

His daring ignited my own. I unfastened his trousers and pushed them and his underwear down to his ankles as fast as I could. When I laid hold of his cock and began to stroke it intently, he pushed my hands away.

"Wait a moment, darling," he gasped. "I can't think to get my bloody boots off if you do that, and I want to love you with my whole body before we're done-feet included!"

I burst into half-hysterical laughter, and he joined in with that wonderful, deeply resonant chuckle of his. Once his footwear was off, Remus lay down on the bed and deftly slid on top of me. I moaned with pleasure as my erection thickened, lengthened, and grew harder. My hand snaked between us to fondle him.

"Not yet," Moony ordered me breathlessly. I was content to conform to his wishes. He kissed me on my mouth and throat repeatedly, although not as maddeningly slowly and thoroughly as was his wont fifteen years ago. Neither of us could have stood the wait this afternoon Then his lips, tongue, and teeth descended to play with my nipples lovingly if a bit roughly. Ah, but I reveled in the keen, delicious pain of his onslaught! Next he nipped at my belly and nuzzled my navel with a wickedly skilled tongue that obviously remembered the landscape of my body in loving detail. Through it all he kept stroking the shaft and head of my penis, keeping me aroused to a fever pitch but changing his rhythm each time that I was about to come.

"Fuck me. Fuck me now," I finally demanded.

He made his hand slippery not as a wizard does by uttering a spell but in the very humble but intimate way that a Muggle does, with his own spittle. When I felt his first wet finger enter me, I went wild and thrust up to meet his hand. He pressed me back onto the bed and murmured for me to be still long enough for him to finish getting me ready. I wanted to tell him that I didn't give a good damn if I was ready or not, that I just wanted him inside me; but the look on his face brooked no argument. A second finger joined the first. Then a third finger joined them both. Heavenly fire shot from my loins throughout my body as he expertly stimulated both my prostate and my virile member. I pounded the bed with my fists and howled like a mindless beast as he brought me to preparedness for the moment of entry.

Then he withdrew his fingers, whispered "Your move," rolled onto his back, and pulled me atop him. I remembered his body in loving detail, too! I deftly impaled myself upon his cock and moved up and down it without hesitation, gaining speed and force as we rocked towards ecstasy together. We fucked each other-I slamming down onto him as he arched up to meet me-until it was obvious that Lupin wouldn't last much longer. He did manage to keep his promise to use his feet in furtherance of our lovemaking! With one leg and foot he held me in place as we moved together blissfully. With the other foot he caressed my legs, as his hands caressed my face, arms, and trunk. When Remus seized my penis again and rubbed it vigorously but without any further change of rhythm, it became obvious that I wasn't going to last much longer myself. In fact, I came first, leaving his belly and pubic hair sticky with semen. A few moments later he came within the confines of my flesh, the warm gush of his ejaculate making my cock twitch with my longing for yet more lovemaking.

I leaned forward and kissed Moony slowly and deliberately and stroked his sweat-soaked hair and beautiful face. From years of habit, I guided the movement of our bodies so that I lay flat on my back with Remy curled against my side, resting his head next to my shoulder. I covered his face with soft kisses and continued to run my fingers through his hair as our breathing started to slow.

Suddenly he was sobbing and his tears began to wet my chest.

"Gods, Remus!" I moaned. "Did I hurt you? I didn't mean to. I swear!" He couldn't speak for his weeping, but he rose up slightly and shook his head so that I knew that I hadn't.

"What can I do for you, darling?" I asked nervously.

Finally he choked out the words, "Hold me. Just hold me."

I hesitated from fear that I'd somehow done something wrong.

"It's all right, Siri," he assured me. "Everything's all right. Far better than `all right' really. But for fifteen years I've wanted you to take me in your arms and let me fall asleep in your embrace, every bit as much as I've wanted for you to make love to me again. I know it's silly..."

"Ah, Moony! It's not silly. For fifteen years I've wanted to take you into my arms and to fall asleep holding you."

"Truly?" he asked-not because he thought I was lying but because what I had said meant so incredibly much to him.

I nodded and kissed away his tears, and then I pulled him to me and we slept with him enfolded in my arms. As in my dream, we had celebrated our reunion as lustily as we had celebrated our first union. Now it was time to rest awhile.

When I awoke next the sun had already set, although its afterglow lingered in the western sky. Remus and I were still wound around one another, with my arms surrounding his neck and shoulders, his about my waist, and our legs twined together. I began to work my way free, trying hard not to disturb his sleep. When he frowned and muttered, "Please don't go! Don't leave me, Siri," I kissed his shoulder and the side of his face and told him that I'd be back as soon as I could visit the WC. He gave me a drowsy, heartbreaking smile and I set out on my errand.

When I returned, I slid into bed next to him-staying close enough to stroke his arm, shoulder, back, and that marvelous ass of his but far enough away to watch him, to fill my eyes with his splendor. At first, he enjoyed my caresses; but after awhile, he realized that I was staring at him avidly. With a little start, he came fully awake, drew the sheet over his nakedness, and turned to face me.

"Ah, Remy! Don't be cruel," I pleaded. "I want to look at you, at every inch of you. Then I want to make love to you for a long, long time. I want for you to accept my love without feeling that you have to reciprocate it beyond giving me a few kisses or a touch or two. I want you to accept it without thinking that you have to take responsibility for my pleasure. It's been fifteen years since I made love to you, darling-sixteen, really, because I never once approached you the last year that we were living together because...because..."

"Because you thought that I was in league with Voldemort," he acknowledged in a small, sad voice so unlike his usual manner of speaking.

"Yes," I admitted. "I'm so sorry that I doubted you!"

He placed one finger against my lips to silence me. "Shh, Sirius! It's all right. There's no need for further bitterness about our mutual suspicions back then, is there?"

I shook my head. "I went to prison knowing that you were innocent, Remus. Every night for twelve years, I dreamed of making love to you... to make up for that cold, ugly year when you had to beg me to do it. And for nearly three more years on the run I've dreamed of it. Let me. Please. You're so beautiful! I just want to look at you and please you and watch you moving beneath me in ecstasy."

I'm not sure if the sound that escaped his lips was a dismissive snort or an anguished sob. Either way, it was unnerving-as was what he said to me after a long, heavy sigh: "Siri, I'm not the good- looking 16-year-old who was thrilled to let you seduce him. I haven't been for a very long time. I'm not even the still handsome 21-year- old that you lived with until they took you away to Azkaban. Best you not look at me too closely! I'm greyer and my face is gaunter and full of age lines and my waist is thicker and my body is more scarred. I don't turn heads any more. I haven't in quite awhile. If you look at me too closely, you're apt to be disappointed. Better you close your eyes and let me make love to you. I haven't forgotten any of my skills in bed."

I was appalled! I felt the blood drain from my face. "Gods, Remus," I whispered. "How can you say such things about yourself? Or believe that I could feel that way about you?"

He shrugged. "Damn it, Sirius! You always told me how much you loved me for my looks. Well, they've been shot to hell for more than a decade now. I haven't aged very attractively, I'm afraid. I'm sure that you can find someone younger and prettier. Actually, you already have, haven't you? Elaine is seventeen years younger than I am-and quite lovely, really."

"Stop it!" I bellowed, and was dismayed that my outburst made him flinch. I drew several deep breaths to calm myself before continuing. "Darling, I never said that I loved you for your looks- only that I loved you and that you were the most beautiful person that I'd ever seen. You still are. I know! My eyes weren't closed earlier. You've aged exquisitely. To me, you're the most ravishing creature on the planet. There's no one I'd rather look at than you!"

"Honestly?"

"Honestly!" I had a terrible thought of my own. "Remus, I know that my face and body are somewhat worse for wear from the time that I spent in Azkaban-and in hiding out ever since. You...my looks don't displease you, do they?"

"No, of course not!"

I smiled and leaned over to kiss his perfect lips. "Well, what's sauce for the gander is sauce for the other gander. Please don't say that anyone pleases me more than you, in terms of looks. It's simply not true!"

Remus smiled at me shyly and some of the tension went out of his body and face.

"I still want to look at you and make love to you and watch you writhe all over the bed," I persisted. "Will you let me do that, Remy? Please?"

He nodded. "But I'm a filthy mess," he added. "Let me go freshen up a bit."

I whispered a suggestion into his ear and afterwards teased its lobe with my tongue while he considered my offer. After a moment, he answered yes in a voice husky with desire. Less than a minute later we were participating in a cherished custom from the days before our separation. In a shower so hot that we could scarcely breathe, I lathered and rinsed Moony's gorgeous and highly aroused body-letting him reciprocate just a bit for the sake of practicality, but gently dissuading him from taking me right there in the stall.

"No, no," I murmured. "It's my turn to take the lead, Remy. Give me a rain check on what you have in mind-all right?"

He nodded but gave me an intensely passionate kiss before moving away from me. Gods! I was more than hard enough to do him justice that very second. It was all I could do to slow myself down and stay with my sexual reparations agenda. I got us out of the shower quickly and toweled us both off without stimulating either of us further before we could get back to the bed. When Lupin realized how intent I was upon making love to him very slowly, centered upon his pleasure, he kilted a towel around his loins and gave me a timid smile that reminded me of the night that he gifted me with the privilege taking his virginity. That was almost a quarter of a century ago, but the thought of his yielding his body to me for love's sake tonight moved me as deeply as his sharing First Love with me had. My eyes were bright with tears as I led him back to bed.

He lay on his back and shut his eyes, as his hands sought out the parts of my body that he remembered being especially sensitive to his touch.

"Open your eyes, sweetheart-please," I entreated him.

His eyelids fluttered obediently open, although he kept them open for only brief moments at a time before closing them again, once I began to lay soft kisses and gentle strokes upon his receptive flesh. "Remus, love," I insisted, "I want you to see how much I still desire your body. It hurt so much to know that you thought that I didn't! Watch me, please, so you won't ever doubt how desirable you are to me."

When he opened his eyes again, they remained open through all that followed. He didn't stare at me, mind you; but his gaze rested upon me without further withdrawal, up to and beyond the moment of his ejaculation. For better or worse, I saw to it that Lupin didn't reach his climax for over an hour; so hopefully his eyes had time to take in an utterly convincing testimony of my admiration of his physically beauty.

What a pleasure it was to give him his due! Remus is marvelously made, from the crown of his head to the soles of his feet. I cannot fathom his thinking otherwise. He delights all my senses-but especially my senses of sight and touch. His spirit is precious to me as well and enhances the loveliness of his flesh! When we were young, Remus wore his mouse-brown hair in a ponytail that reached halfway down his back; and the strands of silver scattered through it were like thin threads highlighting the details of a tapestry. These days his baby-fine hair is short-not cropped but also nowhere near as long as the first joints of my long, thin fingers as I play with it; and the grey spread evenly through it looks more like a layer of gilding than a web of fine threads. "I'm greyer," he said a short while ago, in a voice full of pain-and of fear, because he expected me to reject him for it. But I was not, in fact, repelled by the silver sheen cast onto his hair during my absence. It reminded me of the moon at the height of her splendour, when she floods the earth with the soft luminosity that lovers adore. It was romantic, really, to stroke Remy's hair-like touching moonbeams and letting them seep into my pores and change me from despised felon back into contented lover. How I longed to be a poet, to be able to tell Lupin all that and more! But I was afraid to say anything at all, much less to evoke the moon, concerning which Remus has such mixed feelings.

Moony unwittingly forced my hand by inquiring, "What are you thinking, Siri?" as I continued running my fingers through his hair.

I took a deep breath. "Please don't be offended, darling," I began, "but I was thinking that your hair is like silk to the touch- and like moonlight to behold."

To my relief, the corners of his mouth twitched into the beginning of a smile. "I don't hate the moon, you know! I'm afraid as she nears her fullness because I dread changing with every fibre of my being, but I'm as moved by her beauty and mystery as the next wizard, Sirius. More so perhaps." He reached up and pulled me into a rich, sensual kiss. "I wasn't offended at all," he explained (a bit unnecessarily!) as he released me. "That was a very lovely thing for you to say."

I smiled and put one finger to his lips to silence further conversation for the time being. When I moved my finger away. I kissed him on the mouth, and kissed him again...and again, before letting one hand begin to explore the beauty of his face. When we were young, Remus's skin was smooth and taut. It's become a bit rougher over the years and gained a few wrinkles (or age lines) as he had complained to me, but the firmness has given way to the softness that a young man's skin lacks. I chuckled to myself.

Remy's eyebrows lifted quizzically in response to my laughter but he bided his time, not asking me, "What was that about, Sirius?"

"I was just thinking how good your skin feels, love," I volunteered.

"And that made you laugh?"

"Well, no," I admitted. "I laughed at the thought of what I'll say to you if you ever trot out any balderdash about your skin's gotten all leathery."

"Oh? I have considered that line of, um, balderdash actually."

I stroked his cheek with the back of my hand. "No, your skin is far softer than leather, sweetheart-except perhaps the most amazingly soft fawn skin that I can imagine. I love to touch your face...and your throat...and your body," I added, caressing each part of him as I named it.

He smiled and sighed and let me touch him without serious signs of anxiety. As I was stroking his chest and belly, I became aware of how much hairier they had become in the past fifteen years. The year that I went to Azkaban, I had recently turned twenty-three and my partner was not yet twenty-two. We both had chests "as slick as pair of plucked chickens" as an older gay wizard liked to playfully remind us. I more or less still do and probably always will, as a conspicuous lack of body hair runs in my family. Remy, on the other hand, now has the distribution of "fur" more typical of a mature man- and I discovered just how much fun that can be to play with. Misha once embarrassed me no end by remarking upon how wonderful the "textural gradient" of a man's body hair can be within my earshot. (In fairness to her, she was talking to another married woman and didn't know that my new lover and I were overhearing her. While my sister has never been a prude, she does respect the modesty of youth.) She was right! There was the sensation of the tight wiry hairs surrounding Remus's nipples rubbing against my tongue as it flicked them to hardness. There was the spidery tickle of the tangle of hair at the centre of his chest as I rested my head upon his breastbone. There was the strong arousal that came from tracing the hairy track that ran along the midline of his body from sternum to navel and navel to pelvis. When I unfastened the towel that he had worn back to bed, there was the exuberant riot of the loose curls of his pubic hair and the softer, straighter, somewhat finer hair covering his balls to twine about my fingers. There was the pleasing roughness of the hair on his inner thighs as I rubbed my cheek against it. I got damn near dizzy just exploring the unfamiliar but pleasing hirsuteness of my spouse's familiar body. Moony seemed to enjoy my tour of his hairiness, too-judging from his smiles, moans, whimpers, and gasps.

I wasn't quite ready to go down on Remus when I reached his groin. He was already excited enough to climax very quickly. I wanted to slow him down, so I decided to turn my attention back to his belly. I began tracing lazy figure eights up and down his torso with the flat of my hand: from his breastbone to his belly button and his belly button to the base of his abdomen back past his belly button to his breast bone. I had no idea that he would react to it the way that he did! When I had run my hand straight down the centre of his body, he had trembled; but so had I when he stroked my stomach before making love to me. The sensation is, after all, intense-even without benefit of fifteen years' separation. So I thought nothing of Remy's small shudders at first. It was when they became hard tremors and he began to lose his erection that I began to worry. When I looked at my lover's face, I was appalled. It was pale and frightened, almost panicked; and he looked mere seconds away from tears.

"Shit! Oh, shit!" I swore, which was a mistake. Remus assumed that I was angry with him and tried to get away from me. I wasn't rough with him, but I took full advantage of being on top of him to keep him from clambering out of the bed. I tempered my insistence that he stay put with numerous kisses to his lips and brow and a series of gentle touches to his face. After a minute or two he stopped struggling and began to cry.

"Oh, goddamn it! I hate this," he protested with uncharacteristic vehemence. "Why do I have to be such a baby in front of you? I'm not usually this thin-skinned, Sirius, honestly."

I nodded. "Remus, I don't think you're thin-skinned at all. You just having feelings, like anyone else; and you've jammed them up tight inside of you-and...Well, between Sev, my sister, and myself, they seem to be rapidly coming unstuck. But that's probably a good thing, darling, whether it feels especially pleasant or not. You should have seen me blubber when I first escaped from Azkaban. Now there was a rare sight!"

He chuckled at the vision that I'd summoned up for his benefit. When he did, I asked him, "What did I do to hurt you, love? You know that I didn't mean to, don't you?"

He bit his lip till it bled to avoid crying again. After forcing himself to remain calm for a moment, he shrugged and muttered, "I don't like having my belly touched."

That took me aback, because he used to like having his belly touched very much. "Why?" I asked calmly, doing my best not to further upset him.

"Because it's ugly and fat and covered with scars and, if you don't stop staring at it, you won't be able to look at it without getting disgusted and you won't love me any more!"

What had he said earlier? My waist is thicker and my body is more scarred. Poor Remus! In that moment I truly understood how perfect he feels that he must be in body and soul just to be given a few crumbs of love. When we were young, I didn't understand. I was handsome, healthy, popular, intelligent, athletic, the only son of a prominent family. Everyone admired me and I admired Moony; so Lupin and I had it made, didn't we? Since I doted on Remy, it never occurred to me that he might be struggling with the sense of being plain (or even ugly), afflicted with a loathsome disease, plagued with unpopularity, condemned to be wanted (if at all) only for his cleverness, unable to win victories or even be part of a team, and (worst of all, to his loving heart) a "burden" to his family-and to his lover. Azkaban taught me what it's like to feel like the filth that a gentleman scrapes off his boot heel in disgust. At long last I comprehend how degraded, humiliated, and unlovable Remus Lupin sometimes feels. (As he pointed out, he's not always so volatile and negative in his opinion of himself; but, when he is hard on himself, he's very negative indeed!) But how do I communicate that to him-and how can I explain to him that I looked at his abdomen and saw (and felt) something very different from what he thought I did, and expect him to believe me?

"Would you like to come rest your head on my shoulder, Remy?" I began.

"Yes," he confessed to my great relief, "I'd like that very much."

After we'd lain together peacefully for a few minutes, I asked him, "If I wanted to tell you something that you'd probably disagree with, could you listen to me now-and maybe just consider believing it?"

"Yes," he answered me hoarsely.

"All right-but promise me two things, Remus. Keep your eyes on my face and take slow, steady breaths, okay?"

He nodded.

"I like your body. I really do. All of it-every bit of it."

"How can you say that?"

"Because it's true, love. I know that you think that you've put on too much weight and that your scars are ugly. I heard you tell me that earlier-and... It was easier to contradict you than express my own feelings. But it's probably better for us both if I respect your feelings for what they are, whether I agree with them or not, and explain mine to you so that perhaps they'll seem more credible to you. First off, I'm pleased that you've put on a bit of weight. Even when we were living together years ago, I worried about how thin you got at the full moon. And this summer when you were wasting away and last night when I saw that horrible receiving-ward photo of you so starved that I could count every rib...Remus, you've no idea how beautiful that makes the layer of fat that you've finally managed to put about your middle look to me! You look healthy-for the first time in your life, really. A mature man isn't supposed to have the build of a 16-year-old. I don't ask that of you or want that of you. My eyes and lips and hands are perfectly content to love the belly that you've got-and, as soon as you're ready, I'll show you just how much I mean that. As for your scars... Well, insofar, as you were frightened, frustrated, and full of physical and emotional pain when you gave them to yourself, I'm truly sorry that you have them, darling. I wish your life could have been far less harsh than it has been thus far, simply because I love you. However, I don't think of you as marred or disfigured in any way. Those marks are just part of your unique physique. To me, they're beautiful because they're part of you-like the texture of your hair or the color of your eyes or the shape of your mouth. I could touch and kiss your scars for hours, and it wouldn't be less-or more-wonderful to me than paying homage to any other physical attribute of yours. Do you understand what I'm trying to say to you?"

"Y-y-yes. And, on a good day, I used to believe that." He paused and looked at me beseechingly before continuing. "But it's been so long, Siri! I was afraid that you wouldn't want me anymore."

"I...want...you. I want you today and tomorrow and the next day, right up until the day that I die-and heaven won't be heaven unless I can have you there, too. I want every inch of your body and every corner of your soul. I desire you with all my being. I love you the way that you love Sev, Remy-but I don't guess I ever made that clear to you. When I said that if I'd ever met a saint that it was you, I meant it; and when I say that your body defines perfection for me, I mean that, too. Sometimes perfection happens to be a bit plump and has a few scars-all right?"

There was luminosity and a complete absence of worry to Remus's expression such as I'd never seen before.

"Yes," he agreed. "That's quite all right, Siri! Mind you, you'll likely have to remind me of this conversation a few times..."

I kissed him on his brow and then on the lips. "My pleasure, Moony! In case, you haven't noticed I can be very stubborn."

He blushed, "I'd noticed. That... That's part of why I picked you to be my lover in the first place. It wouldn't do to be too unevenly matched, would it?"

"No."

He took my hand and placed it over his navel. I spent a good fifteen minutes flirting with a progressively relaxed and expectant abdomen. Then it was time to go down on Remus, who was more than happy to be gone down on. He came all over us both and our lovemaking devolved into a playful contest to see who could lick whom clean first. He won- "by a tongue", as he quipped. I lay back and started to draw him to me, but he evaded my grasp.

"Uh-uh," he informed me, "you're not finished yet."

"Au contraire. Judging from the taste in my mouth I am."

"Hah! The taste in your mouth could be given as evidence that I've finished, Sirius; but from the condition of that lovely cock of yours, it's obvious that you most certainly are not finished."

"Is that a complaint?"

"Indeed it is! Until you're satisfied, I'm not satisfied."

"Oh? And what exactly do you expect me to do about it?"

"Fuck me, you daft prat!"

"You don't need fucking at the moment," I teased. "You've already shot your wad-twice now."

"But I haven't been fucked even once yet. And it's a great pleasure in it's own right, orgasm or no."

"Is it then?"

"Yes!" The laughter went out of his face but not the longing. "Yes, Sirius. It is-and I've wanted it for such a long time now."

"Then what are we waiting for?"

When he was ready, I leaned back against the nest of pillows that I'd made against the headboard and helped Remus settle onto my lap. Then I wrapped my arms around him to allow him to stay comfortably seated while he rocked back and forth, up and down on my cock till I spilled my cum into him. When I came, his eyes were locked on mine and his hungry mouth swallowed my triumphant cry of satisfaction.

"Welcome home," he whispered, as he brought a final, passionate kiss to an end.


	4. Snape's Errand

We didn't go back to sleep. Both of us were far too excited. We spent the remaining hours until (nearly!) midnight talking about many of the things that Remus had put off discussing with me for months. By the time that Severus returned, there was no doubt in either of our minds that we were once more friends, lovers...and spouses.

"But that does not mean that I love you more than Snape, Sirius," Remy warned me. "It would be wise of you to keep that thought at the front of your mind at all times-because I have no intention of losing him twice!"

Before I could assure Lupin that I had long since outgrown such foolishness, a firm knock on the door heralded Severus Snape's return. Pulling on my robes first and fetching Remus his pajama bottoms, I went to let Severus in.

"Good evening, Sirius," he announced as brightly as if it were three or four hours earlier. "May I come in? I'd like to keep my promise to Moony-and I thought perhaps the two of you might want to share supper with me. According to Grace, neither of you has budged from this room since I left."

I nodded. "Thanks. I could use a bite, and..." I broke off, frowning. "Remus, have you eaten anything at all today?"

"Something or another around three or four in the morning," he replied. "I raided the icebox but I was very sleepy at the time, so my memory of it's...vague."

Snape, who had crossed the room as he spoke, gave his lover a kiss and sat beside him on the bed. "Try this then," he encouraged Remy, handing him a covered dish.

Lupin cracked the lid and smiled, "Ooh! Steak tartar. Thank you, Sev." He gave Severus a slow, affectionate kiss before falling to with the fork that Snape had also handed him.

"I wasn't sure that you'd feel so adventurous at quarter to twelve, Black, so you have your choice of a medium-rare roast beef sandwich or a bit of warmed-up steak and kidney pie."

"The latter, please," I requested and, after handing it to me, he got started on the sandwich.

"Elaine said that she'd like a few moments of your time, if you don't mind," he added when his meal was half finished. "I'd fancy being alone just a bit with Remus, for that matter."

I licked my lips self-consciously before announcing, "Actually, Sev, my plan is to spend the night with Kitten and to leave Moony in your good hands."

He frowned and asked Remy, "Is something wrong, love?"-which momentarily irritated me. Why the hell, since we'd been talking, couldn't he put that question to me?

Lupin chuckled, "No, my sweet man. Nothing untoward happened between Siri and myself. I hope you're not too disappointed!"

For a split second Snape looked ready to offer a sharp rejoinder, but he quickly recognized that Remus's amusement was benign. "I'm not disappointed at all. A bit worried perhaps, but it will pass."

He nodded. "Well, Sirius and I are well aware that both you and Elaine were apt to be `a bit worried'; so we decided that perhaps we could dispel that anxiety somewhat if we spent the night with you rather than with one another. We've had quite a day already," he added. "More can wait. Besides, I miss you when we're not in the same bed, darling. There's no one in the world that I'd rather snore for than you."

You admitted it!" Snape exclaimed.

"Admitted what?"

"Admitted that you snore."

"Did I say anything about snoring, Siri?" he asked with a conspiratorial smile.

I grinned and shook my head.

Remus drew Severus into another slow kiss, this one decidedly more than affectionate. "But I do admit to wanting to sleep by your side tonight, dearest. Is that all right with you?"

A beaming Snape silently nodded his assent.

I had finished my supper. "I'll take this down to the kitchen," I announced as I rose to leave the room. "I can take your dishes, too, if you've finished."

Moony handed me his with a smile, gave me a fond bedtime kiss, and uttered the oh so welcome words, "Good night, my love. I had a fabulous evening!"

"One moment, Black, please," Snape interrupted. "There's something that I planned to give you gentlemen before you leave. It's...what I ran my errand to fetch home."

I dutifully set the bowls down-and it's a good thing that I did! Had I seen what Severus had to show us with china in my hands, it would have shattered on the floor when I dropped it in astonishment. Snape pulled a small pouch out of a pocket of his robes, opened it, and...spilled Remus's and my wedding bands onto his palm.

Moony spoke first. "Oh, my God! Where did you get those, Severus? I thought they'd been lost forever. Especially mine..."

"Albus has had them all these years, love. He reckoned that one day you'd want them back, so he's been keeping them for you."

"How?" I asked him incredulously.

"He got yours from the warden of Azkaban, Sirius. He pointed out that you weren't allowed to have it, that Remus had given it to you, and that-as Lupin's guardian-he wanted it back on his behalf."

"B-b-but what about my ring?" Remy stuttered. He looked at me shamefaced. "I threw it into the gutter the day that they took you away."

I squeezed his hand to assure him that I didn't hold that, or our "divorce", against him.

"How did the Headmaster get it?" he asked Severus dumbfoundedly.

Snape shrugged. "I was part of the crowd when you cast your ring away, Moony. I'm not above extracting fascinating objects from the gutter on occasion. Like a raven, I'm drawn to bright, shiny things."

"Why?" Remus persisted in a voice choked with tears.

"I honestly couldn't tell you, darling. It just...I don't know!" Severus paused a moment and braced himself as if for a possible blow. He pulled another small pouch from a pocket of his robes. "Now that you have Sirius's ring back, would you like for me to return your token?"

"No!" Now Lupin looked worried. "Do...do you want the token that you gave me back?"

Severus let out a ragged breath so deep that it sounded like a sob. He shook his head over and over, and gradually a singularly beautiful smile spread across his face. He and Moony flung themselves into one another's arms and hung on for dear life. That was definitely my cue to leave.

"Good night, gents," I announced. "May you sleep well and have pleasant dreams, and Elaine and I will see you at breakfast-if you deign to join us. Remy, if you'll hold on to our rings, we can discuss what to do with them another day. All right?"

He nodded, smiled, and waved at me-but he never once budged from Severus's arms. Nonetheless, as I pulled the door to and headed for the bed that I share with Lady Elaine MacGregor, I was content. At long last Remus Lupin and I had begun to build the bridge between our past and our future. What a reunion the day had been!


End file.
